It’s always useful to be able to customize your PC to make it more your own, but it’s also a way to make yourself feel more in control. These tutorials will help you to get control of your computing environment, and shape it for yourself. If you are unsure about any of the terminology please use our glossary or this one.
Most everyone customizes their own PC in the form of software changes. It may be as simple as installing the programs you love or getting deep into the customization aspects of each program. Here we cover many related software tweaks people find helpful for a wide variety of programs.
Create and Configure User Accounts in Windows
How to Add Safe Mode to the Boot Loader Menu
Customizing Hardware or building your own PC can be very rewarding. You can balance price with all the hardware you need to perform a specific task. In many cases It pro’s overbuild their computers (If there is such a term). Having 32 GB’s of RAM sounds awesome but in reality it’s not needed for most. At least not yet.
When building your own PC I always recommend picking the processor first. You of course need to already know what tasks you are going to want your computer to perform and the CPU plays the biggest role in this as it decides in part what motherboard you will be using.
After the CPU is picked out you should decide on a video card. If you are not going to be gaming then you can get away with on board video in many cases. If the PC is going to be used to stream to your TV you will want to ensure audio can be passed along the HDMI port. Some video cards and motherboards do not allow for this but everything is moving in that direction.
After the video card is selected you should choose a motherboard. You should of been able to greatly narrow down the choice in boards based upon the video card selected and CPU. Some of the main features to focus on are the amount of memory and type of memory supported by the board as well as ports such as Sata for connecting drives.
The rest of the items tend to fall into place after this. Things like optical drives, Hard drives, speakers, heatsinks and fans.
The last item I recommend focusing on is the case or chasis. The biggest mistake I see people making here is getting a case that the video card won’t fit into. If possible ensure there is room inside your case as nothing is more disappointing when assembling a PC then not being able to fit everything inside. The same can be said for the heat-sink. Some heatsinks are very wide and tall so be sure you are picking a case big enough to hold everything.
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