Finally Got Dad An Upgrade

The last computer I built was for my father. His old one was a piece of junk, and I had been telling him he needed a new one for about four years. He finally agreed (when his hard drive crashed for the second time), and I went to designing it on Newegg.com.

I went with an AMD of course. An Athlon X2 64, running at 2.7 GHZ. Since my father doesn't game, I gave it an MSI mother board without much RAM capabilities, and only put 2 GBs in it. I gave it a Western Digital 250 GB hard drive, and an LG super multi optical drive, because he wanted to be able to burn DVDs. I also gave it a cheapish case with a large fan on the side. It runs quiet quiet, although my dad wanted to remove the blue LEDs. I talked him out of it, saying they made it look better.

When the parts arrived I began putting them together. After all was in place, I pushed the power button. Everything seemed to start up, but the monitor remained blank. I spent about an hour fiddling with this and that before I opened up the case, and saw my glaring mistake. I had forgotten to plug in the CPUs power cord! I plugged it in and it worked fine.

I went about installing XP pro. Everything worked fine after I installed the drivers that came with the motherboard, and my dad spent about two hours that night looking around Google Earth. The computer had no graphics card, but the integrated were a thousand times better then his old computers capabilities.

In my experience, I learned to always check all of the power cables! I had checked the compatibility of each item about five times before I ordered, and that also proved to be worth the time. Building computers is a fun pastime, and I would do it for free even if I didn't get the computer afterwords.