Basic PC Building Presentation for the Rochester Computer Society, Inc by Tony Dellelo Nov/07

Tools needed: Phillips and flat blade screwdrivers, pliers, thermal compound, method of grounding Gather your parts: Case, Power supply, Mother board, Memory, Cpu/fan, Hard drive, Cd/Dvd writer, Card reader or accessory panel, Floppy drive, Keyboard, Mouse, Speakers Hard drive preparation: Partitioning Operating system: Windows, Linux, etc.

Personal preference: I like to add my memory and cpu/fan combination, before actually mounting the motherboard inside of the case (less stress or flexing of main board when pressing parts into it)‏ Important, be sure and add thermal compound between cpu and heatsink Next I plug in my front case jumpers: power switch, reset button, pc speaker, hd led

Power-up Checklist Before powering up your computer, make sure you have plugged the cpu fan into the motherboard, connected the power supply leads to the board and that the memory modules are properly seated. Plug in the keyboard and mouse, monitor cable and power cord. Turn on computer and check that the cpu and power supply fans are working

pa Turn off computer before making any cable changes. Next, check the lights on the front of the computer. If the light for the floppy drive is on steady, then the 34 pin ribbon cable is reversed. Check the power led (it should be lit, if it isn't, then the leads to the motherboard are reversed. There is no operating system yet, so we might not be able to check the hard drive led.

Hard Drive Preparation Partitioning  Reasons to partition; better hard drive organization, adding more than one operating system, create a hidden partition (store special operating system functions, backups, encrypted files)‏ Formatting  The hard drive needs to be formatted with a file system, before data can be added (Fat32, Windows Ntfs, Linux file system, Mac)‏ Check drive for errors  Windows uses a program called Scandisk

Partitioning Software Commercial Avanquest Partition Commander, Symantec Partition Magic, Acronis Disk Director, Paragon Partition Manage Freeware MrBooter Efdisk; simple but effective, shareware Ranish Partition Manager Visopsys Partition Logic, plans to become a Norton Ghost alternative Cute Partition Manager, setup 100 partitions Partition Resizer Gparted open source for Linux