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Assemble a Personal Computer. (Zif Socket 7 )
First of all, to start building a PC from scratch, I would advise you to at least have some references books with you so that you will know what I want to say, but if you can't, then you have to understand what I am saying. There are no photos to help. If you are really new to PC, and you can't seems to know what are your difficulties, please email me so that I can help you if it is within my limits.
To assemble a PC, we need the following lists of tools
or simply purchase a PC repair tool kits which include nut drivers, torq drivers, tweezers, chip extractor. You can also add a hemostat.
Next, you need the following hardware components so that you can build a basic PC.
Remember that when buying components like RAMs, Display Card, Sound Card make sure that their specifications suits that of your motherboard. If you buy a motherboard that only support PCI bus, your sound card might support the ISA type. In this case, the sound card cannot be used at all.
If you are not sure about what type of specifications you want for you new PC, I say you have to consider what type of speed you want, and your overall budget. If you want a speed that is faster than a 233Mhz, then you can think of a faster speed like 300Mhz or 350Mhz. I had a 233Mhz Pentium and a 350Mhz AMD-K6, and AMD-K6 350 MHz works so much faster than the 233Mhz.
So if you decided you want a AMD-K6 350 processor for example, you can purchase a socket 7 motherboard, supporting PCI, ISA or AGP bus slots. Also supporting 2 SIMMs and 2 DIMMs, USB, AGP.
Below are basics that you have to know about each components
Case - There are some types of very commonly used casing. First is the desktop type. This type sits horizontally on the desk,and offers only a little space for further expansion of components.This is also known as the Baby AT type. Second is the tower ATX type. These types of casing consists of minitower, medium tower and large tower type. The ATX form factor type is a great space for future expansions of hardware components and heat in the case is more easily distributed causing less trouble such as overheating of the CPU. Buy a quality case, and make sure that it comes with cover plates, screws,spacers and mounting needed for hard disk drive and an external battery connector just in case some motherboards does not support rechargeable battery when the internal battery is used up. Also when you buy a casing, be should it comes with a PC speaker.
At the inside front panel of the casing you can see some wires consisting of either red, yellow, green and white,etc., with either four pins connector or three or two. These pins are labeled and is to be install into the front bezel connection pins on the motherboard to activate LEDs. Also make sure that the case you are buying is the correct form factor as the motherboard and that the motherboard must fit into the casing perfectly without much complications.
Power Supply - Power supply is needed to provided sufficient electricity to each hardware components. Today's power supply should have at least four types of connectors; a male four-pin 1 by 1/3 inch square connector(red, yellow,black wires), a female four-pin 1/2 inch square connector, and two rectangular six-wire connectors known as the P8 and P9, and lastly a thick black shielded cable for the main power switch.
Male four-pin connectors are used to provide electricity for hard disk drives and CD- ROM drive.
Female four-pin connectors are used for 3.5- inch floppy disk drives.
P8 & P9 are to be connected onto the motherboard.
Motherboard - Motherboard or Mainboard is one of the most important component you definitely must have. It is a big piece of green component to be mounted into the case. With it , you can install display cards, sound cards, processor and rams onto it, it can determine the speed of your computer. Onboard the motherboard it consists of many other factors for a PC to work, like clock speed, BIOS, Cache memory, I/O ports, IDE controllers, CMOS, battery, jumpers, DIP switches, CPU settings.
Microprocessor - Microprocessor or CPU is the most important component. It is made of silicon and consists of millions of transistors. What the CPU does is it performs various calculations. CPU consists of these; Registers, Data Buses, speed, floating point operation, command sets. It is definitely needed for a PC to send and read data.
RAM Memory - Today's commonly used RAM sockets for the PC are the 72-pin SIMM and the 168-pin DIMM, and the most commonly bought memory types are the EDO DRAM, SDRAM and the latest PC/100 DIMM module.
SIMM -(Single In-Line Memory Module) DIMM- (Dual In-Line Memory Module) The SIMM and DIMM sockets on the motherboard consists of banks. For example, on a piece of motherboard where it support 4 SIMMs sockets. SIMM 1 goes together with SIMM 2 makes 1 bank, SIMM 3 goes together with SIMM 4 makes another bank . In total there are 2 banks, which is equals to 4 SIMMs.This simply means that you have to buy two pieces of 16 Mb each and install the two pieces of 16mb each into the two SIMM sockets, which is SIMM 1 and 2. That makes a total of 32 MB for your PC. There must always be two pairs of SIMMs in a bank.
As for DIMMs, it doesn't need to be in pairs. It goes alone in the 168-pin socket slot and is considered as another bank.
Floppy Disk Drive - Today's floppy disk is about 3.5 inch. The older floppy disk is about 5.25 inch. Floppy disk drive is commonly used for writing and reading data through a diskette. It is relatively cheaper than a hard disk drive, strong and durable and is easily remove but it has lesser amount of space than the HDD.
Hard Disk Drive - Hard Disk Drive is an internal storage drive inside a PC. Depending on the amount of space you need, today's hard disk drive works a lot faster than three years back and hard disk works about 10 - 20 time more the speed of floppy drives. There are generally two commonly used type of controller interface. The two are the SCSI( Small Computer Systems Interface) and the IDE (Integrated Drive Electronics) or E- IDE (Enhanced IDE).
To be able to use SCSI for your hard drive, you will need to purchase a SCSI host adapter. With the host adapter, users can also configure for use together with other peripherals in your PC such as a CD-ROM drive, hard disk drives or tape drive. SCSI allows the control of up to six devices and is fast with the transferring of data. SCSIs are also much more expensive than the IDE controller and its host adapter does not come with the mainboard.
Although IDE controllers are much cheaper, with the E- IDE controller which use a 40 -pin ribbon cable, it can connect up to at least four devices then the previously two. You simply works the hard disk by installing the ribbon cable to an IDE controller on the mainboard. This type of controller is much more faster and easier to use, the best thing is that it is usually shipped together with the motherboard. You will also need to set the appropriate jumper switch on the hard disk drive.
CD-ROM - (Compact Disk -Read Only Memory) CD-ROM drives reads and stores data. For example, when you put a audio CD into the drive,provided you have a sound card, you can listen to music and voices. This way, you can have a multimedia PC . With a CD-ROM, you can simply get video, sound, animation and graphics.Today's CD- ROM has a readable speed of 40x then the old 2x. Buy a CD-ROM with a fast speed to enjoy best music and sounds. The CD-ROM drive is simply a great addition for your newly built PC.
Display Card - Display is one of the fundamentals of a PC. Without display , how can you even think of reading this page now. For a quality display card, you have to check out the resolution, color, interlaced and non-interlaced display, refresh rate, memory, bus type and also compatibility.
For resolution, a higher resolution produces good display on a big monitor such as the 17 inch. New display cards can produce a resolution of up to 1600 by 1200 with 24 bit color support. Some other amount of resolutions are, 800 by 600, 640 by 480 and 1024 by 768.
Today's graphics card can support up to 24- bit of color(True color), unlike the 8- bit, 16- bit (250 & High color). 24- bit color provides a smooth screen display and is suitable for high graphics application like Adobe Photoshop and CorelDraw!.
Go for a non- interlaced display as it is better than the interlaced display. Interlaced Display will lead to flicker and is very bad for the eyes. My display adapter is an Aopen card, using S3Virge/DX 2D/3D Video and Graphics chipset, where it uses only non-interlaced display and I don't get any flicker.
Get one with a high refresh rate, and the image will be better. Refresh rate is expressed in Hz. For example, my resolution setting is 800 by 600. The refresh rate for this resolution should be at least 70Hz . My graphics card's refresh rate for this resolution is 150Hz Non-interlaced. Thus , I will get a very clear and good image.
The memory type for my card, is 2MB of DRAM ( Dynamic Random Access Memory). For the low end users, get a board with at least 2- 4MB .For the high end, get at least 5-10MB, depending on the work type. Today in the computer market, there are many kinds of memory available for the display card, one still has to consider his budget and compatibility with other components.
Older Bus type is the ISA- slot. But I will advise you to go for a PCI bus type. This bus type offers a much faster performance then the old ISA.
Remember that when buying all hardware components, make sure that they support each other. Will you buy a display card using the ISA type if your motherboard doesn't even support the ISA slot?
Sound Card - Go for a Creative sound card and speakers. They sell sound card and speakers of good quality and reliable. I personally use a Creative Awe16 Sound Card and a set of Creative speakers. Most sound cards will come together with a joystick port, MIC in, Line In , Line Out, and speaker port. You can also listen to CDs when you connect the sound card to the CD- ROM using a small audio wire.
Monitor - The bigger the monitor, the higher the resolution. Purchasing what size is totally depending on oneself. A bigger monitor will cost much more than a 15 inch one. It is also heavy and big in size. But bigger monitor screen will cause less eye strain or pains. I always like to use a 15 inch size monitor. So, it is much of one's preference.
Keyboard, Mouse - Keyboard is like a typewriter, with alphabets, numbers, and symbols on it. Standard keyboard has about 104 keys. There are some keyboards specially designed for comfort,such as the ergonomic keyboard. There are also some that are designed for the Disabled. If you have been to some computer shop, you can see many kinds of keyboards, some with colors on the pad, all these boards are generally of the same keys format using a 5-pin DIN connector or a 6-pin PS/2 port located at the back of the computer. Buy a better quality keyboard for comfort and reliability.
Mouse is a special invention.Today's mouse uses light sensitive semiconductors, using a ball to roll against slotted wheels attached to rollers and when the mouse is moved, it produce flickering light. The semi-conductor recognized the light and transform it into movements. There are many mouse of different shapes and size. But to enjoy comfort while working is to buy a good mouse. I used a logitech serial mouse and it hardly gives me any trouble. Like keyboard, to connect for a mouse to work, it either use the Serial port interface, or the PS/2 interface. Most motherboard today support the PS/2 interface and the serial interface together and if you find that you don't have enough serial ports, then you can use the PS/2.