Pricewatcher computer
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PRICEWATCHER COMPUTER DRIVERS
It complained immediately: I had forgotten to plug in the keyboard! I shut it down, plugged in the keyboard and mouse, powered it up, and this time the whole system booted flawlessly.Īfter I loaded all the drivers and downloaded bug-fix updates, the PC was in business - but its networking was not.
PRICEWATCHER COMPUTER WINDOWS
I put in the Windows 2000 CD-ROM and powered up the system.
![pricewatcher computer pricewatcher computer](http://i0.pricewatch.com/images/1616/t2/288df72ef40f088dc5db7bf12e25ebad.jpg)
Next, the hard drive, CD-RW and floppy drive slid cleanly and bloodlessly into their housings in the Superpower case. (An Intel spokesman said the company would consider providing these screws itself instead of relying on third parties.) A trip to the nearest hardware store fixed that.Ĭonnecting the wiring from the case's power supply to the motherboard was tricky, but the graphics and sound cards dropped neatly into their slots.
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The heat sink fit properly on the CPU with some "thermal grease," but the screws Superpower provided for the heat-sink housing did not fit the motherboard.
PRICEWATCHER COMPUTER MANUALS
Unlike any box of Legos, there was no single fold-out sheet of instructions - I had to cross-reference manuals from Intel and Superpower, plus directions at a third-party Web site. I began assembling the system and immediately ran into trouble. But to run old games, I created a second drive partition and installed Windows 98 on that. Tired of Windows 98's inevitable crashes, I went with the more stable Windows 2000. The toughest choice of all was the operating system. A Plextor CD-rewriter, a big Western Digital hard drive and a generic floppy drive rounded out the package. I added a 32-megabyte GeForce2 GTS graphics card from Nvidia, the reigning 3D champ, and a Hercules Game Theatre for audio, which included some clever technology to avoid hiss when converting cassettes and LPs to MP3s. (The Pentium 4 also had its own cooling fan.) Inside, it packed two cooling fans and a beefy 340-watt power supply - more than an off-the-shelf PC, but necessary to power future upgrades. I picked up a roomy, mid-tower housing from Superpower, with six front-panel drive bays and an easy-to-open thumbscrew to remove either side, the top and the front. It also limited me to certain computer cases. The motherboard/processor combo dictated the kind of memory - 256 megabytes of RDRAM from Samsung. I disabled the audio so I could add my own sound card. It also included two Ultra ATA/100 interfaces for the CD-RW and hard drives, a floppy-drive connector, an upgradable BIOS chip to regulate all the other innards, and built-in audio and 10/100 Mbps Ethernet networking. two PS/2), five PCI slots for internal expansion and a fast 4x AGP slot for a video card, with no slow ISA slots to gum things up. The motherboard came with the standard ports (two USB, one serial, one parallel. Many home-builders prefer higher-end motherboards that allow "overclocking" the processor to run faster than designed, but I figured I was already in enough danger of frying the computer. I had planned to build a system around a low-cost, high-value processor from AMD, but competitor Intel's price cuts and performance increases, combined with my desire to avoid surprises, led me to match a Pentium 4 with a stock Intel motherboard. So I read tutorials on tech sites like Sharky Extreme () and did comparison pricing at PriceWatch (). The most complicated part of the project was choosing the processor, case, motherboard, memory and so on - all of which must mesh properly for the PC to run at all. Would it be as easy as building with Legos? Let's just say that if you have never swapped out a hard drive, please don't try this at home. After upgrading nearly every part of my aging Pentium II, I decided I could build a PC instead of buying a new one.