Is making your own PC now "too easy"?

[ViRGE]

Go back to the early days of Win95 when you are feeding in 28 floppy disks to load an OS and you learn that the 27th one is corrupted. GAH!

Thankfully the CD version of Win95 was by far the more common version. Now go back to Office 4.x and you were almost certainly buying the floppy disk version. 35 floppies.:|

 

[vi edit]

Anyone remember working with WinNT where you had a CD install but *still*needed 4 floppy disks to boot the OS before installing. ... And losing the disks conveniently before you need to do a clean install?

 

[mfenn]

We had more jumpers and DIP switches 20 years ago.

Pour one out for the dip switch. :beer;

 

[lamedude]

All the cool kids had Abit's Soft BIOS, but they missed of the fun of flipping a dozen switches to find the optimal settings. 3*66 is stable but lets see if 2.5*75 is faster.

 

[Blain]

Is making your own PC now "too easy"?

yes

 

[Eeqmcsq]

I forgot about IDE's Master/Slave/Cable Select jumpers. You know, I still never fully figured out all of the rules about Master/Slave/Cable Select. There were certain situations which required the Master HDD to be on the end of the cable... or was it the middle? And other situations didn't care. And weren't there some rules the 40-wire vs 80-wire IDE cables?

Oh, and looking around for an extra jumper because the HDD needs 2 jumpers for the Master or Slave setting? Ugh.

Nowadays, SATA drives are just data cable + power cable -> all done! So simple a monkey can do it.

In fact, if a 1,000 monkeys were to work on a 1,000 computer parts, would one of them eventually build a computer? YES! 🙂

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JcSUWP0QNeY

 

[Insert_Nickname]

All the cool kids had Abit's Soft BIOS, but they missed of the fun of flipping a dozen switches to find the optimal settings. 3*66 is stable but lets see if 2.5*75 is faster.

No, lets see if 112MHz*4.5 is faster... :biggrin:

In fact, if a 1,000 monkeys were to work on a 1,000 computer parts, would one of them eventually build a computer? YES! 🙂

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JcSUWP0QNeY

Was thinking more along the lines of:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1DPQW0e9ufM

 

[vi edit]

So I built my first new PC in over 10 years today.
Some things have changed, some haven't.

First the interesting....Power supplies on the bottom of the case? How gravity friendly. 🙂 Keep the weight low and cords out of the way.

You can buy a case, ram, motherboard and video card in about any color you want. Pimp your PC. *shakes cane* back in my day you had the choice of black or off white for a case...and you'd like it! All PCB's were green...with the oddball brown ones. And the only lights you got were HDD and power buttons.

CPU's don't have pins any more? Woah. Funny how things change. They used to have pins. Then they went to a slot catridge. Then back to pins. Now it's a pinless design that you can't bend on accident. 🙂

After all these years they still haven't standarized the HD activity lights, power & reset buttons, ect into one idiot proof plug. You have single pin headers you need to consult a manual to figure out.

 

[DDR4]

Make a schematic of all the components, make your own PCB then solder it all on.

 

[Eureka]

Make a schematic of all the components, make your own PCB then solder it all on.

You haven't done real solder work if you haven't tried a reflow station!

 

[bononos]

......

After all these years they still haven't standarized the HD activity lights, power & reset buttons, ect into one idiot proof plug. You have single pin headers you need to consult a manual to figure out.

This is the annoying part of building and figuring out the polarity of the pins.

 

[mfenn]

CPU's don't have pins any more? Woah. Funny how things change. They used to have pins. Then they went to a slot catridge. Then back to pins. Now it's a pinless design that you can't bend on accident. 🙂

There are still pins to bend, they are just on the mobo. When you're Intel, you have the power to shove complexity and warranty returns off on your "partners" like that.

 

[mfenn]

I forgot about IDE's Master/Slave/Cable Select jumpers. You know, I still never fully figured out all of the rules about Master/Slave/Cable Select. There were certain situations which required the Master HDD to be on the end of the cable... or was it the middle? And other situations didn't care. And weren't there some rules the 40-wire vs 80-wire IDE cables?

It's pretty simple really. Master always goes on the end, slave always goes in the middle. If you want to run faster than ATA/33, you need to use an 80-conductor cable. You can use the cable select jumpers to automatically set master and slave if you have an 80-conductor cable.

Other configurations might "work", but they are incorrect and only work because the tolerances are loose enough to allow it.