Building my Computer (or the beginning of the tech affair)

Today I decided I would build a computer.

Okay, that phrase actually came to me several months ago. But it took until now to get to the actual “building” part.

Ever since college, when I left my old desktop at home, I’ve been using laptops and those never upgrade well. After college funds were low so I bought a small little netbook which, for the last few years has been interesting… AND agonizing. Waiting for the page to load… then waiting for the picture to load… then waiting for the scroll bar to stop hoping back to the top every 2 seconds. I cannot wait to have a computer that will respond to what I ask of it. Why don’t you just buy a desktop you loony gal? Well… that would be too easy wouldn’t it? And there would probably be a bunch of stuff I don’t want that I’ll have to replace, and then there’s that great source of information about computer parts called the internet. Now that I know what parts are better, settling for less for the same price is not really an option… for me. So after much research I have finally settled on all the parts I’m going to buy, and made two large orders that caused me to cringe. Is this what buyers remorse feels like?

After watching extensive videos on how to build a computer multiple times over the last month, I am hopefully ready to begin. Everything is out of the box and carefully placed on my dining room table in the most organized configuration I could come up with. At this point I had a bit of a delay. I bought a static wrist band but had no idea where to put it as my home has hardly any plugs and very little metal. After much deliberation I decided on attaching it to the metal fins inside my baseboard water heating system. Thankfully that is the one grounded metal object near my table.

And so we begin…

….46 hours later

It’s done! I can’t believe it took me almost 2 days. I barely slept, but it’s done! There was a horrifying moment when I thought I spread the thermal paste wrong, and then there was that moment when try as I might those ram sticks would just not go in.  And then I almost keeled over when my windows 7 pro 64 bit was not authenticating. DRM please go sink to the bottom of the ocean. But it’s done! A couple weeks later, it still hasn’t exploded. I call that a SUCCESS.