It finally happened. After years of wanting to, I finally pulled the trigger and bought parts to build a true PC. Sure, I don't have a dedicated monitor, speakers, video card, sound card, or a big hard drive (it crashed during early issues, forcing me to get a Solid State Drive), but it's up, running and I can finally enjoy the splendor of it. But it wasn't easy.
Roughly two months ago, I had someone help me assemble a wishlist of PC parts to buy so that I would buy and build a PC in the near future. While it took me sooner than I thought it would, two weeks ago, we did some fine tuning on the parts and I ordered them, along with a full retail copy of Windows 8.1. Putting together the PC took roughly 8 hours of labor, including opening the case, screwing in grounding screws, the motherboard and as well making sure everything fit the case. Getting the CPU in there was quite simple, actually. As was the ram. The power supply is where everything got tangled, with so many wires that connected to things. After installing it, I put in the DVD drive as well as the 1TB Hard Drive. I turned it on after plugging it, and it didn't turn on. It started, but stopped almost immediately. After some internet searching I found out that I didn't plug in a key component, and after I did that it started. SUCCESS!
Installing Windows 8.1 was somewhat effortless but a problem was apparent, the system wouldn't reboot. It would power on fine, but when it went to reboot it went to a black screen of nothingness, forcing me to power it off and turn it back on. Even after installing drives multiple times, the problem persisted. Checking with Microsoft across two days resulted in nothing but a broken hard drive and forcing me to return it. I was depressed and angry at the turn of events. I spent $500 on the stuff, built it and faced the real possibility of having to dismantle it and replace the motherboard. But I was determined it wasn't the problem. So late Saturday night I decided to use an Amazon Gift Card towards the purchase of a 64GB Solid State Drive. While I had other plans for that gift card, I wasn't willing to wait two weeks to get my other hard drive back.
Fast forward to this past Wednesday, when I got it with the standard mail, and opened it up, and installed into my PC. After installing Windows 8 upon it, the problem of not rebooting persisted. I was sad. Even after downloading various Windows updates again, it continued. So I decided that my last try would be to install all the drivers I previously installed on my old hard drive on the new one, and something different happened. After installing the motherboard drivers, the system gave me command prompt screens, something it didn't do last time when I did this very same process. Afterwards it went to restart, and a few seconds later, the black screen returned. I sighed, but then my PC stopped for a second and sprung back to life, something it hadn't done in my presence before! I couldn't believe it. Once it got back to the Desktop I rebooted immediately to make sure it wasn't a dream. It wasn't! I was so happy and relieved that after a week of trouble with this thing my PC was finally running properly. While I had no sound through HDMI on my TV for a few hours, I managed to fix it by downloading a GPU driver from Intel.
While I'm still puzzled by a few kinks on this new PC, I can at least enjoy the fruits of my labor. I know now how to build a PC, and I'm sure in the future I can build one even faster than I did this time. It's not the most powerful PC, it's not even what I want it to be, but it's a good start and I'm glad I've done something worthwhile in a long time.
