Building your first computer, what mistakes did you do?

A few years back (2003/04/05, not really sure), building my own PC, I managed to purchase a Sapphire Radeon 9200 as a gfx-card to complement my Intel P4 2,4GHz, 1024MB RAM electrically powered bottleneck, and put it all together on a motherboard from heck in a tower that rivals an elephant in size.

I would just like to know if anyone else have made similar blunders?

Or feel free to just reminisce about those good times wearing antistatic wrist straps, carefully placing everything in its correct place. Perhaps you were more like me? Just dismissing the antistatic wrist strap as humbug and banging away the at damn thing, hoping the little bastards would find their own AGP slot, curses galore!:twisted:

I built it on my bed wearing sweatpants and a sweater... a static magnet. :lol:

Also, I installed the CPU upside down... lmao :lol: Luckily, I took a glance at the instructions before I installed the heatsink and fixed it. :P

doing EXTENSIVE testing of all kinds and forum surfing to find out my motherboard was DOA:cry:

the moment i booted it all up again with the new mobo and to see it boot up was a sheer moment of heaven:P and the setup is still running strong today

[QUOTE="OPRFWrestler112"]I used Vista instead of XP :xvillmann

DEAR LORD!

Tell me about it. And trying to uninstall it was like trying to get rid of some creepy robot. It kept holding onto that cliff hanging over the edge of uninstallation screaming "NO, I CAN BE GOOD FOR YOU, DON'T GET RID OF ME, LOOK AT ALL THE COOL LOOKING FEATURES I HAVE!!!" Then I reformated my harddrive :twisted:

Building a PC is a lot like getting your haircut. You want it to be perfect, but it just never is...

Atleast for me

i bought an asus p5n sli, horrid moboinyourface_12

Agreed . I can't wait to drop this piece of $**t

on my first buil

i had no idea about socket sizes,

so i bought an intel 2.4 ghz processor

too bad it didnt fit

...i had the right size heatsink tho

XD

haha i 4got to post

....i bought a celeron to fit after the intel didnt work

XD

right now im literally using it as a medhanism in which to scratch my head

XP

I tried to put the heatsink on the CPU with the plastic still on it. I was wondering why it wouldn't fit and trying to jam it in. Trilvester

thats like eating a pepermint with the wrapper on

anyone can take it off

but it takes common sense, so i would probably have failed too, i sold my common sense on ebay :(

I tried to put the heatsink on the CPU with the plastic still on it. I was wondering why it wouldn't fit and trying to jam it in. Trilvester

LOL I putting this in my sig K?

lmfao!

omg

i..i...no comment

I forgot to put a fourth stick of EDO RAM in my 386.

That's about it.

[QUOTE="villmann"]

[QUOTE="OPRFWrestler112"]I used Vista instead of XP :xOPRFWrestler112

DEAR LORD!

Tell me about it. And trying to uninstall it was like trying to get rid of some creepy robot. It kept holding onto that cliff hanging over the edge of uninstallation screaming "NO, I CAN BE GOOD FOR YOU, DON'T GET RID OF ME, LOOK AT ALL THE COOL LOOKING FEATURES I HAVE!!!" Then I reformated my harddrive :twisted:

Haha! You evil person you!:)

Aaah.... I kinda miss formatting.. Remember the good ole' days with Windows ME... Then formatting was a regular thing. I havent formatted anything for years. Kinda feel like a recovered alcoholic...

My first build is the one in my sig. Thanks to this place and a lot of research, I made no mistakes. Positioning the pegs to hold the mobo was a chore though.

One could say that buying the 7900GS OC was a mistake, but I bought it in Nov when there were no better options for the price (I got it for $120). I knew what I was getting, and it serves me well. Even now, the cheapest choice over it would be the 8800GTS 384MB at $30 more. I am happy.

My first build was an 808 for my dad as I simply refused to give him one of my 286's. I'd done many upgrades to many types of systems over the years at that point, but I had yet to build one from the ground up. Between my father and I, we scavagned quite a few bits for the new system. He managed to get a 20MB (yes, just 20 megabytes) MFM ST225 HDD and controller. I already had an 30MB ST238R RLL drive and controller. I dont know why, but I put them both in. Now at that time I didnt know I could run the MFM off the RLL card, so I thought it needed it's MFM own controller. The end result was a VERY hot ST225 that somehow managed to lose it's interleave and required a complete low level format to set it back. The old MFM controller also managed to cook itself. It took me almost two weeks to figure out what had gone wrong. An old guy at a local swap meet laughed alot when I told him about both cards and explained to me how to fix the problem and that I could get and extra 50% more space from the RLL card on MFM drives anyway.

For what it was, it was a nice little box. A keyboard that could be switched from PC to AT (it was about a hundred bucks back then), EGA (yes, EGA), 9 pin printer, and a 1200 bps internal modem. I also managed to get hold of a pallete of Apple II E add in cards for PC's and stuck one in. More or less, it let you run Apple II software on a PC because it was an Apple II on an ISA card. You pulled your 8086/8088 from your mobo. You then put the CPU on the Apple card. Then you took a goofy poweder blue ribbon cable that had a connector in the sahpe of the 8086/8088 on it's end and plugged it into the CPU slot. Once all was said and done you used an Apple boot disk to tell the card to switch to the 6502 CPU on the card instead of the 8086/8088. The card also took the floppy cables from the floppy controller and routed another cable back to the drive. Yes, floppys use to have their own floppy controller cards. Many HDD cards were "deleux" and offered floppy support as well as the HDD. This was infact how the MFM and RLL cards managed to cause such a conflict in the system. Two floppy controllers trying to run at the same time.

All said and done, it got fixed and worked well for several years. Then I tried to add a Bernoulli drive to it. At this point, the machine was serveral years old and my dad still liked it. Windows 3.0 had come out and I had put it on and he loved it. So the Bernoulli drive somehow managed to cause a catastrophic conflict with something in the system. Both HDD's failed for good and never started again. At that point I had already built/rebuilt upwards of a hundred boxes so I built him another box without any problems.

My first build was an 808 for my dad as I simply refused to give him one of my 286's. I'd done many upgrades to many types of systems over the years at that point, but I had yet to build one from the ground up. Between my father and I, we scavagned quite a few bits for the new system. He managed to get a 20MB (yes, just 20 megabytes) MFM ST225 HDD and controller. I already had an 30MB ST238R RLL drive and controller. I dont know why, but I put them both in. Now at that time I didnt know I could run the MFM off the RLL card, so I thought it needed it's MFM own controller. The end result was a VERY hot ST225 that somehow managed to lose it's interleave and required a complete low level format to set it back. The old MFM controller also managed to cook itself. It took me almost two weeks to figure out what had gone wrong. An old guy at a local swap meet laughed alot when I told him about both cards and explained to me how to fix the problem and that I could get and extra 50% more space from the RLL card on MFM drives anyway.

For what it was, it was a nice little box. A keyboard that could be switched from PC to AT (it was about a hundred bucks back then), EGA (yes, EGA), 9 pin printer, and a 1200 bps internal modem. I also managed to get hold of a pallete of Apple II E add in cards for PC's and stuck one in. More or less, it let you run Apple II software on a PC because it was an Apple II on an ISA card. You pulled your 8086/8088 from your mobo. You then put the CPU on the Apple card. Then you took a goofy poweder blue ribbon cable that had a connector in the sahpe of the 8086/8088 on it's end and plugged it into the CPU slot. Once all was said and done you used an Apple boot disk to tell the card to switch to the 6502 CPU on the card instead of the 8086/8088. The card also took the floppy cables from the floppy controller and routed another cable back to the drive. Yes, floppys use to have their own floppy controller cards. Many HDD cards were "deleux" and offered floppy support as well as the HDD. This was infact how the MFM and RLL cards managed to cause such a conflict in the system. Two floppy controllers trying to run at the same time.

All said and done, it got fixed and worked well for several years. Then I tried to add a Bernoulli drive to it. At this point, the machine was serveral years old and my dad still liked it. Windows 3.0 had come out and I had put it on and he loved it. So the Bernoulli drive somehow managed to cause a catastrophic conflict with something in the system. Both HDD's failed for good and never started again. At that point I had already built/rebuilt upwards of a hundred boxes so I built him another box without any problems.

kodai