One aspect of computing I have loved for a long time is hardware. I have years of experience building and troubleshooting custom built systems. It all started in my senior year of high school when one of my best buds, Doug, suggested I build a computer instead of buying a prebuilt system. At the time you could save a significant chunk of change by going DIY. Since I am a DIY’er and also cheap I was all for it. And so I ended up with an AMD K6-2 @ 300mhz, 64mb ram, and a 4mb matrox video card all on a VIA motherboard.
Unfortunately the system was finicky worked intermittently cantankerous the spawn of the devil (sorry Doug). The ultimate downside of having a custom built computer is that you have to support it yourself, and when things go wrong you have to fix it yourself. Now the computer’s problems weren’t Doug’s fault. This is back in the day when there were not many decent hardware review sites on the web and also the days of a company called VIA who produced chipsets that were *ahem* garbage. However the computer’s faults became its greatest asset. Through countless hours of troubleshooting I became intimately familiar with OS installations, BIOS settings, overclocking, formatting and every other little thing you could imagine. Although I hated that system it has made me who I am today. An avid overclocker who understands each aspect of system hardware and who loves a challenge in fixing a computer.
I own a t-shirt that I received as a present which reads “No, I will NOT fix your computer.” I love the shirt, but I have never worn it because I find the statement too arrogant to be parading it around town. I enjoy helping people even though it can be a gigantic time suck for me. I’ve repaired laptops by resoldering chips on, repaired laptop screens, soldered on new capacitors to a motherboard, removed spyware that had gone borg on the host computer and stayed up until dawn on more occasions than I care to remember rescuing files from crashed hard drives.
Over the next few days I will share some of my cool custom built computers I have tackled over the years. Stay tuned to check ‘em out!
