I had asked my friend to help me because he knew a lot more about computers then me, so he came over when I had all my components. He was also the one who gave me the motherboard and the power supply. Then we were ready to put it together. First we UNPLUGGED THE COMPUTER!(Don't forget otherwise you may get a shock..) We had cleared the desk, so we had lots of room, then we started taking out all the frontal components like the floppy drive, the dvd drive and the two hard drives. After we had gotten those components out of the way we were able to get the fans out, since they were very loud we put some WD-40(A type of oil) in them, this however was only temporary and for a more solid oil it was suggested to put sewing machine oil in.
We also took out the power supply to make it easier to get everything else out. Then we took out all the pci/agp cards, like the modem card, network card and GFX card. Next the CPU(The fan was already off), and finally we took out the motherboard itself. Then we had to put everything in.
We put in the motherboard first, screwing it down tightly to the case. Then we put in the heart, the CPU. It looked much newer than the old one (for good reason), and the fan also looked much nicer, it was all round and smooth instead of square. The one thing to be careful of when putting the CPU fan on is the amount of pressure you put on. It can take a lot of pressure to push the "clips" through but you have to be careful not to break the motherboard, my board for example was bending a lot, so we put a screwdriver or two underneath to help support it.
After that we put in the HDD and DVD Drives, the HDD, almost the same size as my old one, contained more than 20x as much space. Technology has improved a lot. Once those were in we hooked up the GFX card. Everything was in place once we put the power supply in. Then we hooked up all the wires. Plugged the power supply into the motherboard, the DVD and HDD Drive, and plugged the fans into various places. We also hooked the HDD's new SATA cable into the motherboard and with a sleek, new, black IDE cable hooked up the DVD.
Finally we had to figure out where to put all the front panel cables. There was about 8 to 12 of them and they all looked identical except for little text at their side saying things like, "usb0(-)","usb1(+)","pwr sw(+)" and so on. We had no clue where to put them, but after a bit of trial and error (on the Internet) we found the correct manual (my friend hadn't brought his with him), and then we were able to plug it all in. Finally the computer was built! I plugged in the monitor and the power chords, and then pressed the button.
It didn't work.
I pressed it again.
It still didn't work.
I pressed it a couple times in quick succesion.
It still didn't want to work.
I got down on my knees and pleaded. (well not really...)
It didn't work.
We rechecked the power switch and other cables from the front panel, they all seemed fine. Finally my friend touched the screwdriver to the two power switch pieces and it started to start up!
Then it died.
We finally figured, either the switches were broken, which it didn't look like, or something else was broken, like the power supply. We got a couple tools to check the power supply, where you plug the plugs in(no pun intended), and test to see the voltage. With it we determined that the power supply was either dead, or had some dead cables(we saw one), so we got a new one(my friend had 2 spares). We took out the old supply and put in the new one, then plugged it all in. This time the computer booted fine.
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