Troubleshooting
Many first-time system builders are haunted by the question, “What if it doesn’t work?” Or, worse still, “What if it goes up in flames the first time I turn it on?” Set your mind at ease. This isn’t rocket surgery. Any reasonably intelligent person can build a system with a high degree of confidence that it will work normally the first time it is turned on. If you use good components and assemble them carefully, you’re actually less likely to encounter problems with a home-built system than with a prebuilt mail-order system or with a system off the shelf from your local superstore.
Note
Shipping can be tough on a computer. We always pop the cover of PCs that have been shipped, and often find that something has been jarred loose. Our editor reports that when he shipped a PC to his parents, it arrived with the AGP card completely out of its slot. Not good.
Even worse, shipping can cause the CPU cooler to break loose, particularly on AMD Athlon XP systems. A heavy heatsink rattling around can do some serious damage to other components, but even that’s not the major concern. Running a system without a CPU cooler causes an Athlon XP to go up in smoke in seconds, literally. If someone ships a system to you, always open it up and verify that everything is properly connected before you apply power to the system.
Still, problems can happen. So, while it would take a whole book to cover troubleshooting in detail, it’s worth taking a few pages to list some of the most likely ...
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