Number6.2's Journal: Building a PC from scratch, part Two

My first mistake was the motherboard: an ASUS A7N8X-VM/400. Turns out that this little baby is extremely fussy about the memory it uses. Fortunately for me, I bought premium memory for it, and have not had any trouble with it (so far).

Actually, I've been pretty happy with ASUS as a company, although I've been seeing a lot of bad press on USENET lately. Time will tell.

The one thing you must realize about buidling anything from scratch is that the second you go beyond the case the manufacturers expect you to Know What You Are Doing. Things are not really all that bad though: most cables are "idiot proof" (especially the power), hard disk jumper instructions are printed on the case, etc.

  I've noticed little metal gromets in the holes in the motherboard where you secure it to the case. I assume that this is to defeat the people who like to tighten the screws to the point where they hear the motherboard crack.

The place where you run into trouble is the "newer" cabling, like the cabling that goes beteween the front of your PC to the mother board. Specifically: the power supply switch. Boy, you just have to get that sucker off by one pin and NOTHING works. Lost about 1/2 day on that one. Ripped the damn thing apart and put it back together twice before I realized that there was one pin unused between the connector for the reset switch and the connector for the power supply switch.

Give me the old fashined rocker switch on the power supply any day. (*sigh*).

Well, after that, it was an adventure to get the disk drives running. We'll talk about that in the next installment.