Putting it all together

The computer is basically done. I am finishing up getting all of our documents and pictures over to the new hard drive but that is just clean up work. I had a few people ask me why I was building a new computer and the main reason was because our old computer was almost dead. It took about 10 minutes to startup, and then if it sat for more than 10 minutes then you had to reboot the machine because it froze up. With all of the Photoshop and Sai Paint Tools stuff that my wife does, she couldn't handle it.

Also, I couldn't really just upgrade the system because the old machine was an eMachines system that was running on DDR Memory and didn't have any SATA support (that's right, we were on DDR and PATA. For the non-techies, that is old stuff.

I had never built my own system before by buying the parts, but I thought it would be a fun adventure. The most work was figuring out exactly what I needed. Putting the system together wasn't too much work. I put the system together following this step-by-step guide. Also, I did a lot of research on one of my favorite sites using this thread where people were very helpful in answering questions.

Here are a few of the pictures from my build (I am not going to give all the steps as you can find those using the guide that I posted above). I took these pictures with my cell phone so please forgive the quality:


The Parts






Putting it together












Booting Up




Overall, it took me about 4 hours to get everything together and running (the last hour to hour and a half was just setting up Windows). The system works great and so far there are no bugs. I will definitely be building all of my machines in the future because for the price you can get a way awesome machine. If anyone needs or wants help building their own machine then let me know and I would be more than happy to help you out. See the final build parts here.