1. Getting Started With The Basics
To Build, Or Not to Build……..
Understanding The Beast

2. Putting A Shopping List Together
Motherboards
Processors
Hard Drives
Memory
Operating System
AGP Graphics Cards
SCSI Controllers
The Case and Power Supply
Surge Protectors
Hard Drives: SCSI vs. IDE
Which Way Do I go?

3. I’m Armed With A lot Of Knowledge….Now What?
Building A System
Buying A Pre-Built or Built-To-Order System
Spec Out A Powerful System

4. I Found It And Bought It…What Next?
Putting It Together
Formatting the Drive And Installing The Operating System
Custom Installations

5. Maintaining Your System
De-Fragmenting the Hard Drive
Scandisk
Disk Cleanup
Backup

6. Optimizing Your System
Disable Write Behind Caching
Reduce Read Ahead Optimization
Reducing Graphics Acceleration
Make sure DMA Is Activated For All IDE Disk Drives
Turn Off Auto Insert Notification
IRQs & Not playing nicely with others
Don’t Use PCI slot 1 For your sound card
V Cache
Window’s Cluster Sizes
Use A permanent Swap File
Shutting down Unused USB, Serial, And Parallel Ports
More than one is a crowd
The Computer’s role
Highly accelerated graphics cards
Display bit depth
Screen Savers and Power Management
Modems
Specify and simplify