I put together my brothers PC yesterday. I found a nice computer shop in North Rocks; ITEstate, to gather the components for the upgrade to his ancient K6 processor.
Their prices are quite competitive (considering how easy it is for me to get there), and the girls at the sales desk are polite and helpful, as well as being super cute. The guys who get the parts for you are just as friendly. One thing I did like is that he made me stop and double check the serial number of each part before I left.
So for the fraction more I paid, than say going to Fluidtek (but only just), is worth the fact that I didn’t have to wait in queue, and I got what I wanted. Their website also made things easier too.
Anyway enough of a plug.
It took me just over an hour to assemble the parts in my brothers old, and way too small case, which was quick. The mainboard a Gigabyte M51GM-S2G was a micro ATX, so I was able to squeeze it in. It seems quite a good board from first impressions, but I don’t really delve into that area of hardware. So long as all the bits match and work, I’m happy. My only regret was not upping the hard drive specs.
After the ease of assembly, it was time for the pain of installing Windows. While I’ve sold my parents on Ubuntu for their new PC (which is now in the planning stages, and may even become a MythTV box), my brother wasn’t so easy …
He is wedded to iTunes.
But from what I gathered it’s mainly because of the insanely high playcount his library has; he’s so damn proud of it, he can’t let go!
So I started the process at around 3PM, as he returned from his day of Scuba diving (some have it tough don’t they?) and I just managed to finish installing drivers, basic software, etc in time to limp home to bed at around 11pm.
Not the worst time I’ve ever gone through, but made the more difficult by the fact that he had two old IDE drives, I only had one plugged in due to size restrictions, but once plugging in the second, I was left with a nice “hall.dll” not found error message.
Fortunately it was a simple as fixing the boot.ini file using bootcfg, which for the record was quite easy.
… damn it’s hot this weekend!
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