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My computer recently died. I pouted, and then, I moved on.

And by “moved on,” I mean, “started to build a new one.”

So! I’m going to do a series of posts about diagnosing a problem with my computer and building a new one. I think this is a pretty Punkass thing, but if you don’t want to read hardware geeky stuff, feel free to skip these posts.

Part one: why won’t my computer start?

A few days ago, my computer, Kali, wouldn’t start. It wasn’t running when I got home, which is rare, but not completely unheard of, because sometimes the power goes out, and computers don’t like that. Unfortunately, in this case, pushing the power button didn’t have any effect. Actually, I should mention that it kinda had some effect—one of the hard drives flickered for a bit. Apart from that, nothing.

This was… not good. But what to do? I built this computer from parts a few years ago, so it’s not like I could call Dell. (In fact, if I had gotten it through Apple or Dell, they wouldn’t have touched it, unless I’d paid for a bunch of extra warranty.)

Diagnostic One: Is Your Power Switch Working?

All modern computers use the ATX layout. This makes it really easy—or at least really consistent—to diagnose simple, quick problems. One such problem is the power switch.

Here’s a thing you need to know about ATX power switches: they’re a lie. They aren’t actual power switches; they don’t actually regulate power. What they do is send a signal to the motherboard that says, “the power button was pressed!” and the motherboard responds accordingly. This is why when you push the power button on your computer, it doesn’t just… stop. Instead, the motherboard sends the appropriate signals and your operating system shuts down cleanly.

But this makes the power switch really simple. It’s two wires and a plate of metal connecting them. But, y’know, maybe it somehow fails. So here’s how to test it.

Disconnect the power switch from your motherboard. It should only be connected to two pins—remember which pins the switch was connected to. This process might be kinda difficult, depending on who made your computer. Once you do it, though, you have a kinda more hardcore (but actually easier) task.

Take a flathead screwdriver and touch the two pins that the power switch was connected to together. You can also do this with a paperclip or pin, if you prefer. If the system turns on, at that point, then your problem was with the switch.

This is not your problem. I have never seen this be the problem. But, hell, maybe it is, and then you can just put in a new switch, or resign yourself to shorting those pins with a screwdriver. Cheap and easy.

Probably, though, you have a different problem. Moving up the hierarchy of price, let’s see if the power supply is boned.

Diagnostic Two: Is Your Power Supply Boned?

Testing for this is way more fun. It requires an unshielded paperclip. That means your paperclip shouldn’t be anodized or painted. I couldn’t find any that fit this description, so I used two pins.

Here’s the trick: all ATX power supplies (PSUs) turn on when pin 14 on their motherboard power bank is shorted to ground. The ATX spec requires that the wire for pin 14 is green. So, to do this, just find the green wire (which should be four from the left edge, on the top) and connect it to ground (pin 13, three from the top, is a ground pin—or you could connect it to the chassis, which if you haven’t removed the power supply, will also be grounded).

If your PSU turns on, it’s working, at least minimally.

If it doesn’t, it’s broken.

Mine turned on.

Fuck.

This isn’t a guarantee that my power supply works, mind, but it’s a pretty good bet. PSUs are simple pieces of equipment—if something in a computer is going to fail, it’ll most likely be one of the more complex (and expensive) pieces of equipment connected to it.

So, given that my PSU turned on, I went ahead and ordered some new toys.

Step 1: What do I get?

If you want to build yourself a new computer, you have a problem. Specifically: what the fuck do you buy?

Well, you could always buy a Mac. Or a Dell, or any number of other pre-built systems. But that’s not why we’re here. We’re here to build our own computer.

To build your own system, you need primarily a motherboard, a CPU, memory, and a video card. You may also need a case and a monitor, unless you already have those. If you have a case from a pre-built system, it may not be acceptable for your new system. If you don’t, it probably will be—cases last a long while.

I like to check out Ars Technica’s guides to PC building. They’ll give you a good baseline as to what to look for. Make sure to look at the main site for the most up-to-date recommendation (for example, right now their Summer Gaming guide has the most up-to-date recommendations).

After some Googling, I decided to get an Intel Q6600, a quad-core CPU. That is, it has four physical processors crammed onto one chip (this also means that when I start my computer, I’ll see four penguins!. Hopefully.). I’m also getting a Gigabyte motherboard that’s not the one recommended by Ars—the one they recommended is out of stock. This one is a little newer, a bit pricier, but it has Firewire and two network plugs, which I’m pretty down with. Also, I’m getting 8GB of memory. Ars said that DDR2-800 was fine, so I went with it. A note here: memory is probably the single most important thing you can add to improve marginal system performance. If your computer starts going really slow, and flogging the hard drive, that’s because it’s run out of physical memory. Adding more physical memory (not hard drive space) will fix this. 8GB is still a little insane, but I figure it should let me run my system, and have another operating system running at the same time, with memory to spare.

The total damage for a motherboard ($130), the chip ($185), and the memory ($150) is $500. Even if you toss in a powerful video card (say, for example, the GeForce 8800 GT that I’m looking at from Tiger Direct for $120), that’s still $700—a good bit cheaper than you’ll get a pre-built system that’s half as spiffy as this one.

Once all this stuff arrives, I’ll detail putting it together—probably both the simplest, and most rewarding part of the whole experience.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 30th, 2008 at 4:18 am and is filed under Punkass!, Technology, purple smoke. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.