I told my nephew that I had a bunch of spare parts here at my house and all that he needed to contribute was a computer case – he delivered. Shown above is a picture of all the parts we used to complete this build. As some of you can already distinguish we used a harddrive, dvd drive, ram (memory), a motherboard with the CPU and heat-sink already attached and a 500w power supply. There is nothing particularly good about any of these parts, in-fact they’re all pretty bad, but it will accomplish the job of teaching my nephew of how to build his first computer.
After much blood, sweat and tears we had the computer put together. Actually, it was quite easy and the only road bump happened some time later. But, before I get ahead of myself, let me tell you one or two hiccups that did occur. One of them was that I totally forgot to plug in the cable for the CPU power. Without the CPU, the computer turns on but does absolutely nothing – black screen. The second problem occurred when the dvd-rom drive didn’t work. Easy, let’s use a different one – swap – problem solved!
After we confirmed that all was working, and that the Linux Mint OS was installing fine, we high-fived so hard that it reverberated the neighbors windows. It was a job well done and my nephew learned a ton. Once we provided all the required information and the OS finished installing we decided to give it a spin. I passed the keyboard to my nephew so he can enter his password but gets a “password incorrect” error. He tries again, and again, and again. Yup, he forgot the password he picked. Time to reinstall …
