Your First Builds

What went wrong? explain in post aswell

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I think the first one I built was a P166, no problems that I remember except that it was damn slow. But I didn't think so at the time :D
 
Very first build was supervised and it went smooth. My mom is using the machine still. 6 years running.

My first unsupervised system, I forgot to use standoffs on the mobo. Nothing blew. In fact the board and system is still in use by a friend, the third person to own it. Still running smooth after 4 years.
 
zoobaby said:
Very first build was supervised and it went smooth. My mom is using the machine still. 6 years running.

My first unsupervised system, I forgot to use standoffs on the mobo. Nothing blew. In fact the board and system is still in use by a friend, the third person to own it. Still running smooth after 4 years.
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stand offs?
 
Learned to solder on that build.........so yeah that went well.........not.
 
First build? 386 SLC 20Mhz. With a bazillion jumpers and no manual. Some ISA video card and a 2400 baud modem with a 14 inch color IBM screen. It took days to find a working combination on the jumpers, and I left it at that.
 
im building mine as soon as i can sell my new 3.6ghz intel p4 ( so i can buy a gfx card)
i got it brand new , but decided to go intel
 
Nothing at all....


How can someone buy the wrong parts? You really have to be a moron... beccause who would spend all that money, and not research to see that they all work together before you buy them?

Some people need to be eliminated from the Gene pool ;)
 
bought the wrong RAM (got PC3200 but mobo only supported PC2700) and it wouldnt boot into OS i believe. or wouldnt install OS.. forgot.
 
Ah my first real build was a P2 450, nothing went wrong for a few months. Then for no real reason the hard drive would corrupt after a week and I was back reinstalling windows. Found out later.... 3 years later that there was a fix for that, something to do with the capacitors that were in a line behind the processor. Just needed to put a piece of electrical tape on it and all would be fine... thing is still running over in the corner with a little help from some electrical tape.

Got so mad at that thing I went out and got a K6 2 450 with a Via motherboard and a Voodoo Banshee..... man that was a screamer lol..... now when someone brings that junk in to have spyware/adware and virus removed I poke fun at it.
 
erorr404 said:
bought the wrong RAM (got PC3200 but mobo only supported PC2700) and it wouldnt boot into OS i believe. or wouldnt install OS.. forgot.
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Well thats ok....

I am just waiting to hear someone say... I bought a P4 socket 478 for my LGA 775 board.
 
erorr404 said:
bought the wrong RAM (got PC3200 but mobo only supported PC2700) and it wouldnt boot into OS i believe. or wouldnt install OS.. forgot.
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er, PC3200 RAM runs just fine at PC2700 speed.
 
P3 VIA Apollo Pro133-based motherboard along with a GeForce3Ti. Turned out they were incompatible, so that was a lot of fun. Ended up getting the same motherboard but Pro133A instead, so that the AGP4x card and AGP4x chipset could understand each other running at a whopping AGP2x. Yeah, that was easy. :rolleyes:
 
I did something wrong that I wont admit to.

I also had the worst time with "CMOS Checksum ERROR - Defaults Loaded"

3 keyboard/mouse combos later and I'm loading windows.
 
ninethreeeleven said:
I did something wrong that I wont admit to.

I also had the worst time with "CMOS Checksum ERROR - Defaults Loaded"

3 keyboard/mouse combos later and I'm loading windows.
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that helps me none, im trying to see what people did , so i dont make the same mistakes :)
 
AMD 650 Tbird - socket A. The only problems I had were the jumpers on the HDD and the CDROM both set to Master, and the HDD LED was connected backwards (50/50 chance of getting that right). Booted right up afterwards. My biggest mistake was buying a crappy PSU and motherboard. PSU I replaced after 2 months (lots of blue screens), and the motherboard I replaced after a bad BIOS flash. Best thing that ever happened to me...
 
when i built my first rig i was n00b enough to mount the motherboard in the case without standoffs, and i paid dearly for that by totaling the mobo :(
 
My current system is also my first solo build, and while I was taking the metal inserts out of the drive bay so i could put in my cdrom, the insert cut the wire coming from the power button. So to this day I have a small stick to poke the tiny reset button i'm using instead.
 
Hmm I can't really remember.
I would consider my first build when I was I think about 11 or 12 when my parents got our very first home computer. I ripped it apart into all its pieces and spent the next day trying to get it to work again. I am sure some things went wrong but I got it going again:)

The next time I actually bought and built a computer from scratch I don't think there were as many problems, probably just minor things I would imagine, like losing the floppy disc I needed to install something or something like that:)
 
GooG said:
that helps me none, im trying to see what people did , so i dont make the same mistakes :)
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Lets just say it has something to do with the lever that holds down the CPU and forgetting to lift it up in the first place.... "why wont this Cooler lock down?"
 
However my second build was a Brand New Thunderbird 800... in which was flawless build...

But about 2 weeks into the build I bought a new HSF and promptly cracked my Core :(

Fuckin T-Birds :)
 
my first system was a dual celeron 500 on an abit bp6 mobo, no problems, just didnt have an os that could run dual proc.
 
when yall say "standoffs" yall mean the risers that rise the mobo off the case, then you put screws in them?? how many are really needed for a mobo mount?
 
I built a P100 with 16 meg of RAM and 1.6 gig HD for my first build. Damn stuff cost me a fortune at the time. I got lucky and there was nothing wrong with any of the parts so I didn't have to worry about an RMA. Everything worked together fine, also.

Damn, that system was fast at that time. I believe the fastest thing out at the time was the P133 and it had just come out. Man, that system was a screamer against the 486 SX33 that I was using before that. I think it took at least a year or a year and a half for any of my friends to get a system that would match or beat mine.

I still have most of the parts to it and I'm thinking about putting it back together if I can rustle up enough good 72 pin SIMMS to use as a DOS box.
 
I couldn't get the thing to stop randomly rebooting to save my life. After that, windows wouldn't even install. Finally realized that the problem was the heinous "SiS' chipset, so I changed the motherboard and it's worked so far with no problems at all.

I thought I was never going to get it to work. I actually considered ritual suicide in front of my work station rather than deal with the shame of failure.
 
I remember in my first build, the awesome new CD burner I bought for some odd reason would not work as being slave, to my now ancient CD-ROM. either way it was fixed in a later BIOS release.
 
GooG said:
when yall say "standoffs" yall mean the risers that rise the mobo off the case, then you put screws in them?? how many are really needed for a mobo mount?
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Yes, those are stand-offs. Some cases will have them as part of the mainboard tray (i.e., not removable), others require you to put them in yourself. For an ATX mainboard you'll need 6 or 9 of them.


My first build was a lowly Duron 600 on an MSI K7T Pro mainboard. Assembling went flawlessly, only problem was when I tried to turn the system on: nothing happened when I pushed the power button. Turns out that the PSU's switch was still set to '0'. D'uh :p

This system still lives on as my HTPC, aside from the mainboard, which suffers from a bug in the CPU's voltage regulator circuit affecting many or all of MSI's KT133 and KT266-based mainboards.
 
My first build,

cellery 266 /w supermicro p6b***, something like that.
64 meg of pc66
4 gb hdd---I can vividly remember my buddy(helped me put it all together) saying "You will never fill up this monster", lol.
16mb ati rage expert.....later on down the line, I added 2xvoodoo2's in sli mode( that was blazing fast)
Sound - soundblaster 16-bit pci ---> went with A3d(remember those??) later on.
Case - Super heavy all metal ATX monster, I'm glad aluminum cases came out in time for my next major build.
 
other
put it all togther, had problem installing windows. replaced every part and kept fooling with it over a month. finaly replaced the CPU and it worked fine.
 
Some how my CPU and Mobo fried right after it posted. :eek:

RMAed and she was beautiful :cool:
 
pstang said:
my first system was a dual celeron 500, no problems, just didnt have an os that could run dual proc.
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same with me. except i got windows 2000 before i built it :)

instead of replacing the caps when they went bad on my bp6, i decided to build another computer. that machine, however, i made an embarassing mistake. it was a 1.2ghz athlon tbird. i was so excited that i forgot to put the heatsink on before i powered on the system. oops! i called up amd and told them what happened, and they shipped me out a free 950mhz processor. because of that experience with customer service i will only use amd processors.
 
aaronfitz said:
instead of replacing the caps when they went bad on my bp6, i decided to build another computer. that machine, however, i made an embarassing mistake. it was a 1.2ghz athlon tbird. i was so excited that i forgot to put the heatsink on before i powered on the system. oops! i called up amd and told them what happened, and they shipped me out a free 950mhz processor. because of that experience with customer service i will only use amd processors.
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wow, thats awesome
 
GooG said:
that helps me none, im trying to see what people did , so i dont make the same mistakes :)
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I tell ya what I did on my first build. I didnt let my friend (who knew more about PC's at the time) "help me"

I followed the instructions in the mobo manual to the LETTER running through each step carefully and doubelchecking my work. This obviously took twice to three times as long as an experienced builder but I didnt want to leave anything to chance (shoot, I just spent $130 for a 30gb drive, $200 for a Voodoo3 3000 and $100 for a 500mhz K6-2, I didnt want to fry any of it). With that board, I had jumpers to set for my proccie speed and such, so it was a pain.

My 2nd build was a t-bird 1ghz and that went soo much smoother (Jumperless mobo?? Hells yeah!!) but the CPU heatsink installation gave me the willies! Again, the manual had "Danger, do not over clamp, you can damage your cpu!" warnings.


It gets to be second nature. If you are _that_ worried about building your first PC, just read the manual. Dont go to the internet for advice until you have thoroughly checked and re-checked the installation instructions. I say this because with my first build, my CPU would randomly BSOD. I did the manual things, but it turns out it was not obvious. For some reason the k62's on an Apollo MVP chipset board would not run stably at default CPU voltage at 550mhz. Once I found that tidbit out, one jumper change and the system became rock solid where it still runs with original hardware since 1999.

My 2cents, others will differ :)
 
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