It seems remarkably easy once you've been told what to do. It's certainly a lot easier than assembling an Ikea shelf, writes Adam Harvey
IT’S A technophobe’s nightmare: the guts of a computer lie spilled across a desk as a T- shirted boffin points at components and talks of DVI, DDR2 operating at 667 megahertz and standard ATX-sized motherboards.
His students, a group of four grown men, nod thoughtfully – until the spell is broken. “What’s that twisty bit there, the bit that looks like a rollercoaster?” asks one of the men, pointing at a swooping piece of metal in the centre of the computer’s circuit board.
We sigh with relief as we abandon the technospeak and unload the simple questions we’d always wanted to know about computers, but were too afraid to ask. Why is there so much empty space inside the case? Which bits can’t I touch? Why does my computer work better after I vacuum it?
It’s a Saturday morning in an industrial estate in Blanchardstown, and we’re in the middle of Komplett.ie’s free build-your-own- PC course.
It sounds like an intense way to spend the early hours of the weekend and, at first glance inside the PC casing, fiddling with the innards of your computer seems about as ill-advised as DIY heart surgery.
To my untrained eye, the circuit board lying on the table looks like the mottled surface of the Death Star, complete with narrow canyons, grey protrusions and little silver cylinders that resemble water towers. (It turns out that they are water towers, of a kind – capacitators that store power like reservoirs, releasing it into the computer when needed).
After two hours of basic instruction, you realise that “building” a PC isn’t as complicated as it sounds. There’s no soldering or wiring involved and it comes down to unscrewing the big white box under your desk, finding the motherboard (that’s the really complicated-looking Death Star thing), and clicking a handful of bits and pieces into coloured slots.
It’s a bit like Lego for adults and seems remarkably easy once you’ve been told what to do. It’s certainly a lot easier than other DIY tasks, such as assembling an Ikea shelf.
You want extra memory? Stick it in the green slot. Your monitor looks too fuzzy? Plug a bigger graphics card into the white slot. You’re getting lots of strange errors and perhaps even the infamous Microsoft blue screen of death? You probably need a bigger power supply.
All these products are available online – that’s how Komplett.ie makes its money – and installing them yourself will save you paying someone €100 to do simple jobs that are only slightly more complex than inserting a new SIM card into your mobile phone.
There’s a few little tricks – like removing static from your body by touching something metal before you open up the computer. Komplett’s Shelton Rohhanyi explains that lots of computers have an inbuilt limit in the amount of memory they can handle, so it’s important to check before you go out buying extra.
“Building a PC is also far easier than many people might imagine; it’s really 60 per cent a confidence issue and only 40 per cent a knowledge issue,” says Rohhanyi, the Komplett expert who is guiding us through the computer’s innards.
There’s just a few things you need to remember, he tells us. If something doesn’t feel like it’s fitting, don’t force it. “And don’t touch the underside of the motherboard. That’s where you’re going to short it,” he says.
Oh yeah, he says, almost as an afterthought: “You probably don’t want to open up the power supply itself. Power and monitors are the two things you don’t want to take apart. They’re the only things that do actually have enough energy in them to kill a person.”
We write that bit down.
The other attendees are all curious amateurs and they all say they’ve learned a lot from the class. Peter Noone, a retired civil servant, says he wants to try and put together his own machine.
Niraj Goylal is a software engineer who says he’s never seen a motherboard before. “This is hardware, not software,” he says, gesturing at the eviscerated computer. “I think I will try and build a PC as a project for my family.”
John Brennan says he wants to be able to help his friends maintain their PCs.
As for me – I’m going to buy some extra memory for my computer and dive into the Death Star to install it myself. May the Force be with me.
