Blog | I’m a Gamer Girl (building her first PC)

I’ve wanted to build my own computer for years, but it wasn’t until this year that I finally decided to do so.

Funny thing is, I get to thank the President of the United States for sending me money to build it, lol. Due to the Covid-19 crisis, many taxpayers received a stimulus check to help with cost of living. A portion of my check went to paying bills (got to be responsible) and another bit went to buying the components I needed to build my first computer.

First things first, we got the case unpacked and opened up. No problems there. Popped in the power supply and it fit like a dream…

And then, things started getting interesting. My motherboard came with the IO shield preinstalled, which gave us some difficulty because it needed to go in before we could put anything else on the dang thing, lol.

But my brother and I were able to work around that and keep going with the build. We popped the motherboard in and secured it with the teeny tiny screws…

Except then we had a problem… no matter how we turned things around or which parts we tried to use, the CPU cooler just would not fit the motherboard! According to Bob, the motherboard has non-standard spacing for the cooler to be mounted and it didn’t fit with the one I’d purchased.

So, after waiting for ALL the parts to arrive, I was putting everything back in the box to wait, while I sent the cooler back and ordered a new one!

Luckily, my cousin back home in Wisconsin was kind enough to send the spare CPU cooler he had and wasn’t using. Not only does it fit perfectly but it is a much higher quality than what I had originally purchased. Best cousin ever!

We had a couple of oops moments where we forgot to plug the hard drive into the motherboard and then couldn’t figure out why it wasn’t recognizing it, lol. The poor little thing was running just fine, hooked up to the power supply as it was, but we never plugged it in to the brain of the computer!

As I had already decided to purchase a regular sized hard drive, we removed the little laptop hard drive out of the computer and I returned it. I also got super lucky, because a local Best Buy had a Western Digital Black 1TB hard drive that I was able to pick up at the store the very next day! Had it plugged in and running by Sunday evening.

All in all, my brother and I spent two weekends building my computer. Here she is, the “Normandy” in all her first-time-build glory!