Building Better Computers
It seems there is a new holiday tradition in my household. This is now the third consecutive year I found myself piecing together the parts to build somebody a new “super computer”.
This year it was for my son’s best friend who was tired of the lag he encountered while playing games like World of Warcraft and Guild Wars on his aging “rent-a-pc”. So after getting Santa’s approval for the financing, we ordered the hardware to make his games fly and an uber leet box just for show.
We were both like little boys the day the package arrived. We purchased an Asus motherboard, AMD Athlon 64 X2 processor, 1 Gig of DDR2 RAM, Diablo X-Man tower, and an extra translucent fan to keep it cool. The harddrive and CD-ROMs were getting recycled from the old box to save some money.
I grabbed my tools and began to assemble the new and improved machine. Everything fell right into place… well except for those extra USB and audio wires running from the front of the box. It seems the manufacturers of the box and the motherboard had different ideas on how to mark these buggers. Luckily I was able to find my answer with the help of Google.
Things definitely went much smoother with this year’s project. The only thing I missed this year was that this motherboard only had one IDE channel. This did not leave room for both his CD drives. No problem tho… he is already planning to get a larger harddrive for those games he plays sometime soon and we can swap out the IDE drive for a SATA drive then.
