Installing the IDE drives.

The IDE drives are the hard drives and CD-ROMs. Before putting them in their respective bays, make sure you have their jumpers set up right (consult their documentation). You will need your hard drive to be set as a master, or slave (depending on how many hard drives you have).

Then connect the IDE gray ribbon (it's the only one that will fit to the IDE drives) to the drives themselves and then to the motherboard. Like in the above step (#6), the red stripe/dots must face towards the left part of your board.

Finally, connect the power supply to the drives.

Inserting your expansion cards.

Next you will want to insert your expansion cards into your motherboard. These are the sound cards, video cards, modems, etc. Each one of these go into their correct slot (AGP, PCI or ISA) with the metal bracket facing the left part of the case so you can screw them in.

If you have an AGP card, this one will go into the AGP slot, which is brown, and there shouldn't be more than one AGP slot on your board. Slowly but firmly insert the card into the slot. You will know when it's all the way in.

PCI cards will go into the PCI slots. These slots are the smaller white ones.
The ISA cards will go into the ISA slots. These are the longer black slots.
If you got a sound card, which supports CD-ROM audio, now would be the perfect time to connect the digital audio cord to your CD-ROM.

Booting up for the first time.

Now it's the moment of truth. Connect your monitor, mouse, keyboard and power cord to the computer. Don't screw the exterior case cover just yet, because you might have to fix something that doesn't work (let's hope not).

Now turn the power on. If you see something on your screen that matches your CPU speed, then a Memory test that matches your amount of RAM, then you got it done!

Sure you may have to fix some problems, but you can rest assured you got the core stuff done. If you don't see nothing, then you probably omitted one of the steps above, or you didn't do it right. Consult your hardware manuals! They will explain to you exactly how everything needs to be connected.

Setting up your BIOS.

Once you boot up, you will probably see a heading labeled "Press DELETE to enter setup", or maybe "Press ESC to enter setup". Whatever the key, press it to enter your BIOS.

First thing you will want to do in your BIOS is set up your hard drive. More than likely you will have an option labeled "Auto-detect IDE devices". Use this to configure your BIOS to use your hard drive(s).
You may also want to screw around with other items. I can't really help you there, but grab your motherboard manual, and read what it says about your BIOS.

That's it! You're all done! Well at this point, if everything worked great, you deserve a good pat on the back. It sure isn't an easy task to build your own computer.

Some people tend to "rush build" their PCs. Well unless it's a dire emergency, I don't recommend this. You're better off taking each step one at a time, and to make sure everything is securely screwed and connected.

At this point all that's left is to Install your Operating System (OS).

Next Page: Install your Operating System (OS)