Technical Manual Covering the Construction of a PC System - Essay Example

Produce a technical manual covering the construction of a PC system The construction of a PC system is as straightforward as it is fun. Use this guide to put together a very effective system tailored to your needs. One of the first things to consider in putting together a system is what the computer will be used for. This in turn will influence your choice of power supply, CPU and motherboard. We will assume that we are constructing an all-purpose system which will handle most games and all applications. Therefore, it would need to have reasonable memory capacity (RAM), a CD ROM drive (for music,VCDs etc), a floppy drive (to allow emergency boot disks in the event of a hard drive failure), a video card (to watch those VCDs) and a sound card to listen to music CDs or video clips right on the computer. Finally, the system would need to have an operating system installed on it. Four purposes, we will be installing Windows XP Professional with Service Pack 2 as it is well supported by Microsoft and more virus resistant than ever before. And so to the acquiring of the component parts prior to a detailed description of how to put all those parts together. The manual will explain the reasons behind the choice of each component so that the builder can adjust each component once the principle is understood (read: more or less expensive!). The Components: Because of the ever increasing power demands of the newer applications, we shall use a ATX 450W power supply with fan. We will choose a pressed metal tower case with sufficient grills to add extra cooling fans (your CPU can never be too cool!). Verify that the case has at least 2 USB outlets in front to facilitate use of flash drives and other USB powered devices. The case will typically have about 3 screws holding the side panels in place. We will choose a Pentium 4 3.2 GHz processor1 (with cooling fan) to keep costs down without sacrificing performance. We will choose a good quality branded motherboard based around the 875 chipset.2 This uses the ageing AGP card system CD ROM 52X max HDD (floppy). These devices have been around for about 18 years and while “floppy drives played a critical part in getting new PCs up and running…this role has been replaced by bootable operating system CDs [leaving the] floppy drives these days…to create emergency boot disks for virus removal software or undo disks for system utilities…” (Rosenthal, 2004, p.7). 120 GB ATA drive (8 or 16MB cache) 2 x 512 DDR 400 (PC3200) SDRAM [explanation of configuration later] 128 MB graphics card (Video needs more CPU power than graphics card power) Nvidia Sound card 17” LCD monitor (consider a CRT monitor if you mainly intend to do graphic design work as colours (a critical component) are truer to print output. We are ready to start our assembly! Now that we have assembled our components, it’s almost time to start the build. However, there are a few simple safe practice guidelines to bear in mind: Wear an anti-static band around your wrist (this will eliminate the threat of “frying” your drive, motherboard, CPU and other sensitive components because of static electricity build up). It doesn’t take much to blow $400……. Make sure work area is well lighted and that area is clear of any live electrical wires or appliances. Work table should be stable and free of clutter. With regards tools required: “In terms of what tools you need to put together a PC, all you should need is a No. 2 Phillips screwdriver and a pair of sturdy blunt-nose pliers” (Yates, 2005, p.76). THE STEPS 1. Open up the case by undoing the screws and removing the side panels. 2. Insert the Power Supply Unit (PSU) taking care to line up cooling fan with case vent. Attach firmly with supplied screws and ensure the three-pin AC power cable is free and ready to be attached to the motherboard. 3. Carefully take out the motherboard from its antistatic bag and match up the holes in the board to the holes on the case. Then add the plastic stand-offs (supplied) to those holes. At this time, also make sure that the rear of the motherboard matches the bracket at rear of case. If not, remove case bracket and replace with compatible bracket which will have been supplied by motherboard manufacturer. Before fixing the motherboard to the case, it is easier to attach the CPU and fan assembly to the motherboard first. 4. Installing the CPU and heatsink/fan: a. On the motherboard, raise the CPU (processor) retaining latch. b. Remove CPU from antistatic bag by its edges, place into processor socket and push retaining latch back into position. c. Add some heatsink compound (don’t skimp on the quality of this seemingly unimportant item. Buy the best) to the heat spreader on top of the chip. Some instructions suggest ‘mounding’ compound in the centre of the heatsink. Follow whatever particular instructions come with your processor. The heatsink/fan assembly will sit on top of this. d. Because we are adding a regular Intel heatsink/fan unit, we need to align four pegs on the corners of the heatsink/fan assembly with holes in the motherboard. Once these are aligned, slightly raise the motherboard so that there’s room for the connectors to go through the holes and push connectors through. Be sure not to pinch the wires. Then connect the power for the fan to the correct (nearby) connector on the motherboard. This will be clearly marked in the manufacturer’s manual. 5. Once this is done, lower the motherboard with its CPU and Heatsink/fan assembly back into position in the case and attach to the spacers. Attach large ATX power cable to connector on motherboard. It can only go in one way. Refer to manufacturer’s manual. Then add the square 4 pin 12 volt connection located near the CPU. If the board has a 24-pin connector and the PSU supply only a 20-pin plug, check to see if there is a converter in the pack. If not, Yates (2005) suggests plugging the 20-pin connector into the rightmost 20 pins of the board’s socket as a workaround. 6. We will now add the two sticks of DDR RAM to the motherboard giving us a total of 1GB memory; probably the very minimum for a system that will reasonably run the resource-hungry Windows XP operating system plus games and memory-intensive applications like Photoshop/Quarkexpress, Bryce and Macromedia. The reason for using 2 sticks rather than one 1GB stick is that there is a school of thought which has tested 2 discrete sticks of memory in a dual configuration to run faster than a single stick of a similar amount of memory. I subscribe to this school. (One could use 2x 1GB sticks3 [this will be dictated by motherboard specifications], but we are talking about an average PC build here…). So, we open the white latches on the end of the memory sockets, align the notch near the centre of the edge connector of the memory stick with the matching key in the socket, place carefully and push home until white latches rise to close position. One needs to be careful not to push too firmly for fear of cracking the motherboard. 7. We can then insert the graphics card by aligning it with one the empty PCI slots on the motherboard (the board will have between 3 and 5 slots). Break the soft welds of the cover on the rear of the case and screw in the card to the retaining wall. 8. Add the sound card in a vacant PCI slot following the procedure above. 9. We will now add the 120GB hard drive which we will later format and partition. Slide the drive in from inside the case, align with front of case, ensure connector is visible and screw in place. Attach IDE ribbon (or round) cable to drive and to motherboard. Attach to the power supply. 10. Do the same with Floppy drive and attach both IDE and power connections. 11. Now insert the CD ROM drive from the front of the case. Make sure it is aligned and secure it in the cage with the supplied screws. Connect the audio lead to the CD drive while the other end is secured in the correct connector on the motherboard (see manufacture’s manual) Attach the IDE ribbon to drive and to the second IDE slot on the motherboard and connect the power supply from the PSU. Make sure that the tiny jumper lead at the back of the drive is set to ‘master’ as we only have the one optical drive at this stage. We are nearing the end of our build. Just a couple of things to check, connections to make and then we are ready to power up. 12. Next we will connect the front panel power, front panel lights and front USB port power switches. These may be colour coded or come as a block connector. Check the manual and connect appropriately. 13. Now go over the whole motherboard and make sure all the wiring is in place and connected, especially the CPU fan power connector. 14. Leave side panels off for now and plug AC power connector into the wall. 15. Attach the speakers, keyboard, mouse and monitor to the PC and POWER ON. Now that all is running smoothly (don’t worry, it will!), it is time to install the operating system. Installing the system software 1. Insert the Windows XP Pro software CD into your computer, reboot and, when prompted with the ‘Boot from CD’ message, allow the software installation to proceed. 2. On the Welcome screen you press ENTER to set up a fresh install of XP 3. You press keyboard key F8 to agree to the Windows Licensing Agreement. 4. The next screen will ask you whether you want to create a partition in the unpartitioned C drive. Press C to create a partition. You are creating a partition because, if the registry is ever corrupted and you need to wipe the drive, then one reformats and installs only to the C drive leaving all your work files and data intact on the (logically sequenced) D or E drive. 5. You will then be prompted to choose which partition to install XP on. Choose Drive C. 6. Next you will need to format the drive(s). You will be asked to choose between 2 drive formats: FAT or NTFS. Choose NTFS as it is a more robust system of partitioning. Be sure to select Quick Format 7. XP will lead you through a series of screens which are straightforward until installation is complete. 8. Upon completion of Windows installation, all that remains is to install the: Motherboard driver software CD Graphics card driver software Sound card driver software 9. Once these final steps have been completed, reboot the computer for the final time. CONGRATULATIONS. YOU HAVE JUST BUILT YOUR FIRST PC! Addendum If however, the computer does not begin to install the operating system from the CD drive, you might need to get into the BIOS to set it to read from the CD. You will need to do the following: Reboot the computer and when prompted on the start-up screen press ‘Delete’ to get into the BIOS. Have your motherboard manual handy and consult to see how to ensure that system recognises the CD ROM as a boot drive. The prompts are self-explanatory. References Case, L. (2003) 875 Chipset Review: Intel Hits a Home Run [online] available from: http://www.extremetech.com/article2/0,1697,1149614,00.asp [accessed 28/11/05]. Rosenthal, M. (2004) Build Your own PC. 4th Ed. New York: McGraw-Hill. Yates, D. (2005) Build Your Own PC. PC User, August 2005, pp.76-80. Read More