Why you should build your own PC
1.11.2016
Translation: Jessica Johnson-Ferguson
I always build my own PCs, just like a lot of you digitec users out there. But instead of presenting you with my latest setup, I’ve decided to encourage everyone to join us and build their own PC.
It’s Saturday morning and I’m in Coop stocking up on junk food and cola. The reason for this is that my best friend’s coming over for our annual ritual: Building a PC. We’ve been doing this since we were 14 years old. My old PC is long past its prime and some parts are almost 10 years old. High time to give the old machine a general overhaul.
Today, we’re replacing the graphics card, processor, RAM and mainboard. It’s the first phase in setting up a modular and future-proof infrastructure for a smart home. My new setup:
Extension cables always come in handy.
So why do I need my best friend at my side for modifications that are really quite simple to make? The whole thing only takes a bit under two hours and might even be done faster if he weren’t here. But it’s not about that. It’s about emotions and not technology.
More than a throw-away article
These days, buying a laptop, a mobile or a tablet involves nothing more than unpacking it. You’re not really taking a critical look at its hardware. This makes your device a throw-away article.
We’re 14 again
"How much dust fits into a processor cooler?", asks my friend as I’m piling up all the cardboard boxes for recycling. “No idea”, I reply and put the string aside to take a look at the dust in my ancient processor cooler. Impressive. “Yep, that’s dust alright”, I reply. For some reason, this makes us both laugh.
Old parts expertly placed in the "cable archives" for a while. Just in case anything goes wrong with the new bits.One time, we spray-painted a keyboard black, just like Zero Cool in the movie “Hackers” had done. Even though we found out that spray paint is really sticky, it worked really well.
On one occasion, we freed my PC of its bulky case and gave it a slim one. It was the first case for which I didn’t use any LEDs. To this day I don’t understand the purpose of power-on LEDs. I mean, who needs a lamp to tell them that their PC is running? I’ve stayed true to having a lampless PC; much to the disbelief of the case modding scene.
My case is white but it's the same typeI gained a lot of my knowledge about PCs (hardware and software) from my tinkering with them. Of course, there was the occasional mishap but when everything went totally pear-shaped, there was always a professional PC building/repairing expert to fall back on.
Done. The network connection still runs via wi-fi as the migration to fibre-optic is not quite ready.I still make mistakes. Observant users might have noticed that the picture at the top of this article shows that my hard disks are built in the wrong way round. We noticed the mistake about two years after we’d made it and corrected it right away.
Better late than never
Last but not least a few tips:
And now: Get your screwdrivers out, open up that PC and see what you can do.
Header image: What's wrong with this picture?
Journalist. Author. Hacker. A storyteller searching for boundaries, secrets and taboos – putting the world to paper. Not because I can but because I can’t not.
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