Sunday, October 5, 2014

Have you ever thought about building your own computer? Actually buying a motherboard and a case along with all the supporting components and assembling the whole thing yourself?

Here are three reasons why you might want to consider taking the plunge:

You'll be able to create a custom machine that exactly matches your needs.
It will be much easier to upgrade your machine in the future because you'll understand it completely.
You may be able to save some money.

And, if you've never done it before, you'll definitely learn a lot about computers.

In this article, we'll take you through the entire process of building a computer. You'll learn how to choose the parts you'll use, how to buy them and how to put them all together. When you're done, you'll have exactly the machine that you need.

The first step in building a computer is deciding what type of machine you want to build. Do you want a really inexpensive computer for the kids to use? A small, quiet machine to use as a media computer in the living room? A high-end gaming computer? Or maybe you need a powerful machine with a lot of disk space for video editing. The possibilities are endless, and the type of machine you want to build will control many of the decisions you make down the line. Therefore, it's important to know exactly what you want the machine to accomplish from the start.

Let's imagine that you want to build a powerful video-editing computer. You want it to have a quad-coreCPU, lots of RAM and at least 2 terabytes of disk space. You also want to have FireWire and USB 3.0 ports on the motherboard. Look for a motherboard that supports:

Quad-core CPUs (either Intel or AMD)
At least 8GB of high-speed RAM
Four (or more) SATA hard drives
FireWire connections (possibly in both the front and back of the case)
USB 3.0 ports

Then it all needs to go in a case with enough space to hold multiple hard disks and enough air -flow to keep everything cool.

With any computer you build, knowing the type of machine you want to create can really help with decision-making.

$500 gaming computer

AMD Athlon X4 760K CPU: http://bit.ly/19Baf3P

MSI A78M-E35 Motherboard: http://bit.ly/1i5hNjP

2GB EVGA GTX 650Ti Boost GPU: http://bit.ly/JMWENn Out of stock? Check out the Radeon R7 260X: http://bit.ly/1knwNcD

8GB Crucial Ballistix Sport RAM: http://bit.ly/19g9ejF

1TB Western Digital Caviar Blue HDD: http://bit.ly/1bTXUUt

430W Corsair CX430 PSU: http://bit.ly/18UZgyn

Rosewill Line-M Case: http://bit.ly/1erNC5S

These parts make up the $500 build however since this is a custom PC feel free to customize it with some of these options!

$501.94

Tuesday, May 6, 2014

ASCII Table and Description

ASCII stands for American Standard Code for Information Interchange. Computers can only understand numbers, so an ASCII code is the numerical representation of a character such as 'a' or '@' or an action of some sort. ASCII was developed a long time ago and now the non-printing characters are rarely used for their original purpose. Below is the ASCII character table and this includes descriptions of the first 32 non-printing characters. ASCII was actually designed for use with teletypes and so the descriptions are somewhat obscure. If someone says they want your CV however in ASCII format, all this means is they want 'plain' text with no formatting such as tabs, bold or underscoring - the raw format that any computer can understand. This is usually so they can easily import the file into their own applications without issues. Notepad.exe creates ASCII text, or in MS Word you can save a file as 'text only'