Building a PC With My Son

Last Friday night during dinner my son let me know he was very interested in building himself a desktop PC.  We chatted about how fun that would be and knowing how I'm always on the lookout for activities to do with him (yep, he's a teenager now) I jumped at the chance for him and I to do this together.  Right after dinner we headed over to our local Fry's and he found a case that he really liked which we bought it on the spot.

Yep, it is big and white, but it was the one he picked out.  I actually like it, too.  Of course, I've got a white iPhone 5 and it sort of reminds me of it.  We eventually decided to call his new rig Arctic Thunder after the popular arcade game where you ride a snowmobile through all kinds of mayhem.  You remember it... it was a follow-on from Hydro Thunder (which I actually like a bit better).

We hemmed and hawed Saturday night researching various build options and ultimately settled on the stuff you see at Arctic Thunder Component List that I ordered on that Sunday.  Yes, some of this stuff was a bit high-end (I'm thinking of the i7 processor), but my thinking was to get stuff that would get him through high school.  You surely can build a PC cheaper than what we did, but as they say, "if you're gonna be a bear – be a grizzly!"  I did offset a high percentage of the costs by using up all of my Amazon gift card balance (that's my credit card reward "scheme" – not "miles").

Everything was slated to come in on Tuesday and I was fortunate enough to have a light day of meetings as was able to telecommute so that I could be home when the boxes of goodies arrived.  The motherboard arrived pretty early that day.

These ASUS motherboards are pretty slick and I think worthy of consideration if you decide to build a PC of your own.  As for the rest of the components, they didn't arrive until around 8pm and my son was getting very worried they simply wouldn't make it. 

We got an even later start on putting it all together and we were having some troubles with mounting the motherboard in the case.  Also, that crunching sound when we closed the hatch on the CPU sounded like money down the drain.

We finally got everything all wired-up and installed just before midnight.

Imagining that "Murphy" was going to pay us a visit, we decided to go to sleep as we were both exhausted.  Truthfully, I was just as worried that all would work fine and we'd be up several more hours getting the OS installed and playing with a completed PC.

The next day we tried to power it up and, of course, no dice!  Knowing it was probably all the the various leads (namely the power and reset ones) we played around with them some more and finally it powered up.  I never imagined I'd be so thrilled to see the BIOS setup screens.  BTW, this ain't your father's BIOS – it actually looks cool.

We then went on to install the operating system.  As you'll see from the Arctic Thunder Component List, we went with Windows 7.  Now... we did a lot of back/n/forth on the OS.  I was very adamant that we should install a Linux distro and then run VMware or VirtualBox to run Windows in a virtual machine.  I finally gave into making the host OS Windows when I accepted that to get all the gaming optimizations my son will want, we'd have to have Windows as the base operating system.  Bummer...  I then made it crystal clear that we'll install VirtualBox and a distro like Ubuntu as I'm hoping for him to learn some Linux skills, too, from my investment.    As for Windows 7 instead of Windows 8.  Yes, I should have just gone with 8, but I absolutely can't stand that silly tablet-looking interface they are pushing.  Besides, my son backed me up when he said some games are still having Windows 8 growing pains.

It sounds like we should be at the end of the tale, but wait... there's always another problem.  The motherboard has a gigabit ethernet port, but my son's room doesn't have a wired connection.  Yep, great planning on my part!  We do have some electric "wireline" network adapters in use at the house, but I simply couldn't get this new PC to recognize it (interestingly enough, his Lenovo laptop that also runs Windows 7 had no troubles).  So, I did some quick research and found a decent $20 USB WiFi adapter we could get.

I picked it up the next day (Thursday) during lunch and we had no troubles getting it connected at 144Mbps.  Now we just had to get through the 1,000,000 Windows updates since Win7SP1 which went pretty fast on this screaming machine as the callouts below indicate.

Then, all we had to do was move it from the workbench up to his room and now he is the proud owner of a very rocking new PC.

We had a great time building this PC together, but I'm positive he'll have much more fun playing games on it.  Long live Arctic Thunder!!