Check out Mechbgon's new builder's guide at Mechbgon.com When I build, I usually just have the hard drive, floppy drive, burner, memory and video card installed. If I have any other hardware, I'd add that in later one at a time. When you first boot up, you should enter the BIOS setup and adjust the time and date for the real time clock, make sure the memory settings are correct and check all the other settings to be sure they are what you want. Particularly you want the optical drive to be set up to boot and before the hard drive in the boot sequence. Then you can boot your OS install disk and install the OS. Once that's done, you can install your drivers. I usually start with the mobo drivers first and the video drivers next. I generally like to have gone on the net and downloaded the latest drivers for the hardware as it is seldom that drivers that come with devices these days are the latest ones. Though you could do the audio drivers first. There also may be a BIOS update out there that fixes something important. Check for that while downloading your other drivers. Others just shotgun it and install all their hardware at once - sometimes the PC gods are with them, sometimes not. I find it is easier to troubleshoot if you do one thing at a time and reboot in between.
Yup, more "interesting" than you thought, eh? And definitely you don't want to be connecting the new machine to the Internet until you've got a good antivirus and a good two-way firewall installed. You can't believe how quickly an unprotected machine will be attacked these days. And the first time you are online, you want to update your OS with all the critical patches. (update.microsoft.com)
It's been so long since I read Mech's site, that I'm not sure how much detail he goes into on the software end of things. There are lots of builder's guides out there - check out several well recommended ones. Good luck.
.bh.
