Assembling a computer from components is nowhere near as difficult as it used to be in the days before the advent of Plug-and-Play. In those days Personal computers required that every device inside had to be manually configured from the geometry of the hard disk drive to the IRQ's and memory addresses of the expansion cards. In these elightened times the device need simply be present on the mainboard for the computer to configure it itself.

We have prepared as a tutorial a simple computer build. The machine has the basic elements required to operate and the machine was eventually delivered to its new owner where it does excellent service as a general office computer. The shopping list for this computer was -

• Case with power supply
• Mainboard
• CPU
• Hard Disk Drive
• DVD Burner
• Memory

The mainboard used in this computer build has onboard video, sound and ethernet. That is the graphics card, sound card and ethernet card are built into the motherboard and expansion cards for these roles are not required. The video card will use part of the RAM for its video memory. On board devices are sufficient for office or basic home use but for gaming or audio mixing the onboard devices fall short in performance when compared to expansion cards. PCI express and PCI slots are also present on the mainboard and can be used to add better graphics cards etc. If a graphics expansion card was inserted into the PCI Express X16 slot it would automatically disable the onboard video. Other onboard devices may need to be disabled in the computers BIOS.

The tools required to assemble a computer are a philips head screw driver and a flat head screw driver. Sidecutters or tin snips may be required on more stubborn cases. Without further preamble, click the link below to proceed to the example computer build.

Click Here to Proceed to the Example Computer Build