47 Beating the blues

That dreaded Blue Screen of Death that causes everything to freeze can be avoided. It just takes planning and patience.

The blue screen usually signals hardware failure. It could also be that you are using incompatible device drivers. Or simply that your system components are overstressed.

Keeping your system clean is one way to avoid the blues.

Here is a rule: Remove any dust or build-up of dirt and grime. They make the fans work too hard to cool your computer. Heat kills hardware, so make sure your system runs as coolly as possible.

If the problem is a faulty or incompatible driver, use System Restore to return to before you installed that driver.

48 Taming the USB

So you plug in a perfectly functional USB device and it does not show up on your PC.

This could be due to a conflict of the drive letters that your PC assigns to USB devices.

Unplug the USB, disconnect any one of your network drives and then re-insert the USB device.

If this solves the problem, you can stop it from happening again by assigning drive letters manually. This will prevent Windows from assigning conflicting drive letters to the device.

Simply click Start, right-click My Computer and select Manage from the drop-down list. A Computer Management window will open. Go to Disk Management under Storage and find the USB device that was assigned the conflicting drive letter, right-click and select Change Drive Letter and Paths, then click the Change button and select a drive letter that does not conflict with other drives.

49 The essential tool

A good strong screwdriver is a must for anyone wanting to build his own PC.

Unless you have an expensive case with fancy bolt-down catches to keep your graphics card or hard disk in place, you will need that low-tech tool to help you secure your components to the chassis.

It should have a stem of decent thickness and a comfortable handle large enough to make it easy to screw down or release a hard drive.

Using a cheap thin tool wastes effort because it provides inadequate leverage.

50 Don't let mother down

Make sure you keep the motherboard from warping.

Over-enthusiastic newbies who build their own PCs often over-tighten the heatsink mounted over the CPU, in an attempt to improve contact between the two, so that heat dissipates faster.

But this may lead to a warped motherboard, especially if you use a heavy aftermarket heatsink instead of the one that comes with your chip.

The heatsink's weight, coupled with extreme pressure applied over it, ends up bearing down on the fragile motherboard and can damage it over time.

Check for warping by inspecting it from the side. If there is a problem, ease up on the mounting.

51 Give it a test run

Want to put together a PC? Test with a barebones setup first. If you have not already done it at the shop, boot up your PC with the bare minimum of components plugged in.

Position your CPU on the motherboard, slot in the RAM and graphics cards (if you are not using an integrated graphics chip on the motherboard) and power up. Do not forget to hook up the power supply unit to the motherboard.

Next, look up the cluster of front panel connectors on your motherboard and locate the two pins used to power on your PC (check your manual).

Touch both pins with a screwdriver. This should jumpstart the PC. Check that the CPU fan is spinning and that the monitor connected to your graphics card is showing the right amount of memory.

If everything checks out, shut down and install the rest of the components.

52 Ready, set, troubleshoot

If your barebones system has trouble booting up, try the usual suspects.

Some motherboards have LED panels that highlight the problem, such as the lack of a memory module. Others beep several times to hint at the problem.

If the PC does power on but quits almost immediately, check that your CPU fan is linked to the correct connector. This precaution ensures the CPU does not overheat.

If the PC lets out a loud sharp shriek, check that the graphics card has been connected to the power supply.

But what if nothing happens?

You will need to make sure nothing is shorting the motherboard, for instance, that the bottom of the board is not in contact with a metal surface on the chassis.

Also, check that your CMOS (complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor) setting on the motherboard is set to normal (instead of "reset" or "clear").

If that does not work, remount the CPU.

This story was first published in The Straits Times Digital Life.

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