Building a Computer - An Illustrated Step by Step Guide

This online guide to building a PC became the book proposal for the "Build Your Own PC," the how to build a computer book series that I write for McGraw-Hill, which is now out in its 4th edition. I've used your feedback about what you want to see in a computer building book in each rewrite. The current edition of Build Your Own PC starts out with the basic vocabulary and functionality of PC parts, something you'll need to be familiar with before you start shopping. Next we cover selecting and shopping for parts, and how to avoid spending twice as much for a system that's only 10% faster. The third chapter, introduced in the second edition, points out the common mistakes people make when assembling PCs. The fourth chapter is a complete, illustrated, step-by-step guide to building a 3.6 GHz Pentium 4 560. The Pentium 4 is built with a new Socket 775 LGA, 1 GB DDR2-533 memory, PCI Express video (256 MB) DVD recorder, and SATA RAID. The fifth chapter is a Athlon 64 3800+ with 1 GB DDR-400 memory, AGP 8X video, SATA drive, modem and wireless card in a midtower. Both of these systems are new to the 4th edition.

Chapter six is held over from the 3rd edition, and features a Pentium 4 in Socket 478 with SCSI and IDE drive array options for high performance and increased data integrity. Chapter seven, new to the 3rd edition, is a quick install guide to Windows XP Home Edition. Chapter 8 was also new to the 3rd edition, and it contains troubleshooting procedures for a new PC, in a step-by-step checklist format. The photo glossary that was included in the first two editions has been dropped from the 3rd and 4th. There are approximately 250 photographs in the book, over 200 of which illustrate the step-by-step instructions for building the three example computers. Make sure that you see "Fourth Edition" in the book description or on the binding, the covers of the 2nd and 3rd editions are otherwise identical, and the used books sold online as the 4th or 3rd edition are often really the 2nd, so beware!

I'd like to update these pages further, but my contract with McGraw-Hill prevents me from competing with the currently published computer book. It's a tough business:-) What I've done with this old site that used to have an illustrated early Pentium bulding guide is post a sort of blow-by-blow review of the three core building chapters from the 4th edition of the book.

Building your own car using parts from an autoparts store is pretty dumb, in the end, it will cost you a good ten times as much as just buying one new from the manufacturer, but you can make your own laptop backpack using your existing laptop bag. When it comes to building a PC, the most important part is determining how much performance you need before you start buying parts. When it comes to buying a laptop, the most important thing is deciding how little performance you can get by with. I'm starting a new section on my other website on buying, upgrading and repairing laptops, so if you're looking for a cheap laptop solution, you might want to check it out. I'm also considering writing an impractical guide on how to build a laptop computer, though the result won't look anything like the sleek notebooks sold by the big manufacturers. The real question will be whether building a laptop from salvaged parts is cheating, or if I should use standard micro-ATX and end up with a luggable. In the meantime, you may want to look at my growing guide to laptop repair.