March 26, 2004
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Building Computers
You can walk into almost any store anywhere these days and buy a computer, but do you know what you are getting? Most people neither know nor care. They simply expect it to work, whatever they get.
As misplaced as their confidence might be, it was worse just a short time ago. Hardware and software was much worse. There are a variety of reasons, particularly for poor hardware, but it mostly boils down to attempts to push feature-laden, sexy-appearing machines as cheaply as possible for as high a price as the market will bear. The usual shortcuts involve overseas manufacture (repairs, if possible, will cost more), cheap cases (opening the case almost guarantees getting a variety of painful cuts), weak power supplies (that cause a variety of mysterious symptoms), and crappy video cards (Dell's most notorious weakness, shared by many others, and the one component most likely to fail in all machines).
Those who want their computers to work and to actually do something were, until recently, forced to carefully select the critical components for the machine and either have it built or build it themselves. Bleeding edge gamers must still do so. For the rest of us, building a machine has become optional, although you must still know what to be aware of (or beware of) when shopping for a package deal.
The machine I am using right now was purchased as is. I hope never to open the case. It came with Windows XP Home which, at the time, I was expected to be able to support on my job without a machine at work on which to gain any experience or run any experiments. It also came with two optical drives, one DVD+RW/CD-RW and one DVD-ROM. It has a Pentium 4 running at 2.50 GHz, 512 MiB of RAM and a 120 GB hard drive, adequate to support its intended purpose of producing DVDs for Project Gutenberg. The only things that came with it were the keyboard and mouse; there was no monitor or speakers.
But that is the exception. Mostly I have my computers built. I start by selecting a case. Cases usually come with power supplies, but if I'm not happy with the power supply in the new case, I'll replace it with a higher quality one. Next comes the motherboard or, as some would state it, the chipset. However, the computer I just had built for Cathy (and Delia, although she doesn't want to use it) included the motherboard, too.
In general, I prefer AMD processors over Intel processors. AMD tends to run a bit hotter but perform better. However, I'm not at all happy with some of the available chipsets / motherboards and have wound up going for more conservative configurations with Intel processors over the past few years. I also go for higher quality processor cooling. Burning up a processor and motherboard once made me a tad bit more conservative.
With the case, power supply, motherboard, processor and as much memory as you can afford all in place, the new computer is mostly ready. Adding hard drives is almost trivial. If there is no video on the motherboard or the supplied video is inadequate, there are many inexpensive video cards that are simple to plug in. Sound, like video, is either on the motherboard or inexpensive and easy to add. If you are replacing an old computer, you may want to take the video and sound cards from the old one for the new one; you may also want to scavange the old hard drives.
When I built what is now my backup computer, I installed removable trays for the primary and secondary hard drives. That allows me to quickly swap between different operating systems. In addition, each tray has its own cooling fan, giving the hard drives additional cooling, contributing to a longer life. I've never seen this feature in an off-the-shelf computer. That wasn't the only additional cooling I installed. Cathy's new machine came with additional processor cooling and I've added extra fans on my backup computer.
If you have the impression that I stress reliability over performance on my machines, you would be correct. I don't do gaming or anything else that demands high performance, but I hate having a machine fail on me at any time.
I'll delve into the weaknesses of operating systems later.
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