Build It Patiently

The last computer I built was more of a undertaking for Dr. Frankenstein. I had found an old used Gateway Essentials computer on sale for about 10$ dollars at a yard sale. Being somewhat of a tech junk junkie/pack rat I decided it would be great for my next computer building project.

The moment I got home I hooked it up and powered it on. The first thing I noticed was the familiar comforting sound of a single short beep. The PC powered up quickly passing all POST start up tests perfectly. The monitor flickered and the fans powered up sounding much like a jet engine roaring to life for a moment I thought all was well, but then I heard it. *CLICK* *CLICK* I know right away what the problem was. The hard drive was no more. Luckily I've never been able to part with an old hard drive. I rummaged through my old computer parts I had lying in around my bedroom until I found what I needed.

The Gateway came with a Quantum Fireball 20 GB hard drive. I switched this dead drive out with 100 GB Samsung hard drive. Not the biggest of drives but perfect for this little machine that would ultimately end up in some short lived networking project before being another high tech dust collector in my corner.

After I set the drives jumper setting to master and connected it to the first IDE port. I decided I'd make sure that this drive had not died before I took the trouble of bolting it into the hard drive bay. A quick boot and tap of F12 later showed it in the BIOS.

Of course I needed and operating system, so instead of trying to load a $100 dollar copy of Windows XP home on a computer designed to run at best Windows 98. I decided that a copy of Linux Red Hat would work best. 45 minutes later I was staring at a freshly installed Gnome GUI running effectively, even if slowly.

This made sense though. The system only had one 128 MB PCI 133 MHz stick. This of course would not do, so I found an old motherboard with 512 MB stick and swapped it out.

Speed was still a concern. So next came the bigger task of swapping out the 333 MHz Intel processor for the 500 MHz Intel I had on hand. This went over easily. All that was left to be done was bolting the drives in and bolting together the case.

That's were I hit a snag. The old Gateways had a vertical mount hard drive that fit snug against the front bezel, very snug. So snug in fact that unbolting them and/or hooking up the power and IDE cables can be almost an impossibility for those of us who don't have elf hands. The hard drive screws into a plastic drive bay which clips into the case. The locations of these clips cannot be understood to anyone. So I did what was best in those situations; bend and pry. Of course this resulted in a broken drive bay, but with a consolation the drive was out. The new drive was then placed in by a simple modification of one of the CD-ROM expansion bays. After looking at the broken bay the solution was obvious. This is probably one of the most important things one can learn when building a computer: patience.