Barebones And Beer

So there I was in the spring of 2008, making a pair of 2-year-old name brand computers limp along, trying to use them for things like file downloads, entertainment, gaming, and video editing/creation. As I'm not a particularly wealthy guy, my chances didn't look great in the realm of purchasing a new machine - prices were in the $800-$1000 range for the retail machines which were built for my wants.

One of my buddies suggests, "Hey, just build one. You know enough about computers that it'll be no problem!"

Thus was born...My $300 Computer Project. I put the budget at that point since it would be roughly one-third of my expected tax return that year.

The hardest part of the whole thing was getting started. I paged through several sites well-known for selling discounted computer parts piecemeal, and was frankly a little scared of the whole process.

The biggest issue was that I was afraid the parts I selected wouldn't match - especially if purchased from different retailers. After about a week of indecision, though, I decided to simply take the plunge...but with a safety net. I bought a "barebones bundle" from one of the large online OEM retailers which included the motherboard, power supply, case, and processor. This was enough to quiet my match-up fears, since they were all being sold together. Nothing could POSSIBLY go wrong, right?

....actually, it *was* right.

Now, to keep myself under budget, I had allowed the $300 Computer Project permission to reuse parts from my two old machines. I figured I'd be cannibalizing stuff all over the place. Didn't happen. All I ended up re-using was a hard drive and a network card, and these are easy enough to put into any machine if you hunt around and find the proper connectors. I worried my old machines' RAM wasn't going to be enough. Of course, it was completely the wrong type to go into the motherboard I'd selected, so I resigned myself to use some more of the Project's budget for memory.

Eventually (actually fairly quickly - those guys in brown know how to get stuff from one place to another fast!) all my pieces arrived: the barebones kit (mobo, processor, case, and PSU), memory (in another box), and the Dirty Little Secret of the barebones kit - a cooling fan and heatsink. Make certain you know if your kit doesn't come with one - several retailers void your warranty if the cooler isn't on the same order as your processor!

I got my workspace cleared, made sure I was fully grounded, all that jazz. Things started going together nicely, this bit here, that bit there, until I had a big black box with a fan that quietly whirred along, with a motherboard and HDD mounted in it. Now for the processor and other hook-ups.

It is at this point that I congratulate the astute reader who has noticed that I haven't even mentioned heatsink compound. Bravo to you. Shame on me.

The processor snapped into its socket with no troubles, firmly locked in with the shiny little lever there. Then as I was poised to put the cooler on, I remembered the stuff that I just mentioned, the heatsink compound. Luckily I was only three blocks from the local Electron Hut, so a quick trip down there solved my problems.

Yes, I'd like to talk to the old guy who lurks in the back. No I don't need a cell phone. Yes, I'm sure I don't need another cell phone. Do you know what heatsink compound is? Thank you, for directing me to the old guy lurking in the back, who I asked for in the first place.

Once I got home, prize in hand, everything went smoothly. The fan and heatsink attached properly. The cords and wires and things that carry electrons from one place to another all went where they were supposed to, except the reversed leads on the case LED. Oh well.

Twenty minutes later, a new lean mean machine sat on the workbench, ready to do some serious work. And time wasting. I took it upstairs, to the accompaniment of impressed "ooh"s and "ah"s from my friends and family, then plugged it in for bootup. Now of course the Windows XP on the recycled HDD saw a new equipment configuration and crawled under its metaphorical blankly, weeping. And the budget had used $280 of the $300 limit to this point. Lovely.

One of my friends upstairs heard my anguished cries and came to console me. A new copy of Windows XP would blow my budget by about eighty bucks. Now one must understand that he's one of *those* computer guys. Not just someone who can rattle off the specs on a gaming machine to "impress" the "ladies", but who has actually done all this many many times. He pulls out his keys, I ask where we're going, and he flips them around like some kind of ninja with one of those butterfly knives from American Ninja II. Thumb drive.

He sticks it into my new paperweight's front USB port, and we reboot. BIOS is commanded to allow boot from USB. It relents to our superior kung fu. Twenty minutes later, I have a lean, mean, and most importantly functional operating system: Ubuntu Studio. It does all the (video, internet, audio) stuff I need it to after a few updates. It does none of the gaming stuff I want it to at all, ever. My buddy has an Xbox, though, and I have twenty bucks left in the budget for some beers.