Welcome to "Building your own PC"

A tutorial on building your own computer

I have built many of my own systems after upgrading my 486. I started as a "user" with a Comadore64 and bought a Comadore128. That was followed by a 286 and then my 486. I have built two K6-2 systems and a Celeron system for my self as well as several Athlon XP systems. Along the way I have found where to go for help. Where to go for parts and of course, learned a few lessons the hard way. The following is an attempt to hold the hand of a first time builder in a step by step assembly of some old and new parts. I will include some (very amateur) photos, links, and a few tips on what not to do. After finishing this tutorial you should be ready to build your first system with confidence. Having confidence and a reference like this should help make it a very enjoyable and rewarding experience.

One note of caution though. Computer hardware and software very in quality greatly and this will greatly effect how trouble free this experience will be. I recommend not cutting corners on purchasing your components. Many things like CPUs, keyboards, monitors, speakers etc. can be a place to skimp now and upgrade later. However, skimping on quality RAM, Video cards, motherboards and drives may cause your system to run unstable, requiring many hours of troubleshooting to determine that you should have spent the extra $50 and avoided all the trouble in the first place. Having said all that, we'll be using some of my old parts and some new ones to put our tutorial system together.

This tutorial is amateur built and will most likely be jumbled and unorganized if not viewed in 1024x768 screen resolution. I have tried to go heavy on the pics so I had to make the page sizes small to minimize load time. When possible I'll try to keep lessons grouped by subject.

To begin the tutorial just click "NEXT" at the bottom of the page or click a link in the Navigation box to the left, to go straight to a section of interest.