The Joy of Building a Computer

Computers are expensive. Branded ones are even more expensive, and you cannot repair them yourselves, because their hardware parts are soldered to the motherboard. Computer fabricators have to make a living, so they are expensive too. I have been repairing nonworking computers at home and even in the office when the maintenance guys do not turn up despite repeated calls and work gets stalled. I don’t do chip level repair, and any such repair we have got done from others has not worked anyway. I change rams, SMPS, cables, CD ROMS, hard disks, CPU fans etc. Formatting C-drive and reinstalling Windows is a routine now. So when two of my office computers conked off, and we had already spent quite a bit of money repairing some others, I decided to upgrade them myself. On the advice of our engineer, I procured two sets of Intel’s motherboard and Atom processor, and 1 GB RAM. The configuration may be a bit slow for gamers and programmers, but is adequate for office work. I took the old computers’ boxes, stripped them, fixed the new motherboards and processors inside them, fitted them with hard disks and DVD writers, powered them from the SMPS, and then called the engineer to do the electrical connections. He showed me how to read the circuit diagram given by the manufacturer of the motherboard and fit the wires to the motherboard. Once that was done, the computers were ready. We tested them and they worked. I will not need the engineer the next time for fixing the wires too. And the whole thing cost us less than 8000/- rupees. I was delighted because we had built two computers, with me holding a gynecologist’s degree and no formal training in hardware management. Those of you who wish to repair your own computers and build new ones can also do this. It saves a lot of money, and gives immense pleasure if you are not a hardware engineer.