How to Customize Your Computer

How to Customize Your Computer
By Jason Baker
First off like building a car you need to pick out the chasis in the IT industry this is your case. Some may come with more fans a power supply or nothing at all.If you go to some sites you may see them selling cases with cathode ray tubes for lights and power supplies, that is all good. Just find something that you like and that you ard. There are many different brands of boards out there so I will not even begin to go into that. One of the main factors you will want to consider when getting a board is the type of processor you want to put in it. Intel or AMD. They are both reliable producers of processors though you once again can not stick an Intel processor in the slot for an AMD board. A popular type of processor that is from intel is a socket775 processor. The processor will usually come with instructions to properly install your processor and fan. Make sure that before you put the fan on that you put a smalldab of heat compound on the fan and install it properly. The other factor you will want to consider is the type of slot for the video card and other cards you will add. With the latest boards there typically will not be an on board video card so you will have to purchase one. So depending on the board you have your new board wil either have an agp slot or pci-e e is short for express. These are just different technologies for your graphics cards. Now if in the absolute worst case scenario you cant purchase either card appropriate for your board there may be some computer shops that you could get a pci video
card for. NOT RECOMMENDED. Also note once again that you CAN NOT mix and match slots and cards. agp to agp and pci-e to pci-e. PCI-E cards are more popular now days than agp. You will be more likely to get a pci-e card as opposed to agp. Each cards price will depend on the size of its memory. You will pay more for a 512 mb card than a 128 mb card and so on.
Now that we have the case the motherboard, processor and video card you will need to focus on the hard drive and optical drives. TYpically on modern computers you will not see a floppy drive. We will not even worry about this piece..
So for the hard drive you will need to look at a few key factors. Its rpm or revolutions per minute, its size and how it is connected to the motherboard.

You will more likely see hard drives with an rpm of either 5400 or 7200. The more rpm themore it will cost. The same goes for the size of the hard drive. The more space will generally cost you more money. You will want to select your hard drive and video card as well as processor based on what you want to use the system for. This means do not use a budget system with minimal hardware to play graphically intense games or to install windows vista on.
For a general use computer for school work downloading music and online games that are not graphically intense your best bet may be with a 128 mb video card and a 160 GB hard drive. But for those that are more into graphics games and processor intense programs you will want more memory for your graphics card , ram and more space for your hard drive. After I go over the ways to connect the hard drive to the motherboard i will go over the specifics in ram.
Now there are two ways to connect a hard drive to a motherboard. You can determine the type by the way the back end of the drive. If you see a set of two rows of pins that are either 16 or 18 pins long then you have an IDE hard drive. If you just see two small flat areas one being slightly larger than the other you have a SATA or Serial ATA Drive. SATA drives are better since their cables are able to move data much faster than the ribbon cable used for
the IDE drives. The same types of connections that are used for a hard drive are also used for the optical drives.
For ram or random access memory is a semi long flat board with several chips on it. Your most common types of memory are sdram, ddr, and ddr2. There is also an opsolite technology for ram called rambus. Take a look on the net for it if you wish.
Sdram is for older motherboards ranging from socketA on down. These are more expensive and hard to find. Now you will need to consult your motherboard manual on the type and speed of the memory needed. DDR is used for socket 478. DDR2 is for socket 478 on up.The speed of the memory will depend on the requirements of the processor and motherboard. So now we have the case, motherboard, memory or ram, processor, video card and hard drive.
We still need the sound card and optical drives. As far as sound cards go you may have an option or two. Some boards do still come with either a 5.1 or 7.1 surround sound-sound card, but if you want something better then you will have to go with a pci card. Now depending on how much you want to spend you can get just a basic sound card for fairly little money though if you want more out of it then you will be looking at more of an expensive model.
There are even cards out there that will ship with a front panel that will slip in the 5.25 bay under your optical drive.
To cap the system off you will need some sort of an optical drive to be able to read and burn discs. You can go from a basic cd burner all the way to a blueray burner. Though I have no experience working with blueray burners I do know that a dvd DL or dual layer burner will
allow you to read and write cds and dvd/s Note that if you get discs that have a -R those are readable. This means that once they have been burnt and finalized thats it no more data
can be put on the disc. The exception to this is if you were to create what is called a multi-session disc. So if you have a file on a cd that takes up 450mb of the disc you can save it to where the next time you run your burning program you can fit a file or more to take up the remaining 150mb. If you get discs with a-RW that means that of course they are
rewritable. Need I say more.Oh and one last part I forgot to tell you about is the power supply. This is where of course
all those parts will get power from. You will see one large trunk that has a clip on it along with several smaller connectors and maybe even a semi thin black flat connector for
your sata drives. Take the trunk and plug it into the mounted board. Make sure not to force anything otherwise the traces on your board will break and your board will be dead. Make sure that the clip is facing the notch on the power connector. This means that the clip should be firmly over that little overhang and the pins should fit tightly into that connector. There will be a smaller 4 pin connector that needs to be inserted also onto the
board. locate it and make sure the clip is on the same side as the notch on the connector when inserted into the board. There are different wattages for power supplies This all depends on the amount of power needed for your drives and pci agp and pci-e cards.Well I hope that this article has been helpful. Know that the information outlined above is all dependent on your budget and what you are wanting to use the system for. I would suggest
more memory, hard drive space and a bigger size memory for your video card if you are a gamer or have programs that use up alot of your systems resources. If you are wanting something for the average user that downloads music, plays online games and browses the net then a system with less ram hard drive and video card can be put to good use. Just do your
research and if you are not comfortable with taking on the task of putting together your system you can always have someone here at Baker IT Services put it together for you. So take your time to take a look at our site at www.bitsonline.us and have a wonderful day!

Jason Baker
Baker IT Services
916.752.0205