Building Your CPU

Last week, we showed you how to build your own custom PC, from picking the parts, to putting it together and installing your OS. Here's the complete guide, along with a printable PDF version that you can use as a reference.

Lesson 1: Hardware Basics

Building a computer from scratch gives you the perfect machine for your needs, but it can be daunting the first time around. For our first lesson in building your own PC, we start with a little computer hardware basics.

Lesson 2: Choose and Buy Your Parts

In this lesson, we'll show you how to most effectively pick out and shop for your parts.

Lesson 3: Building the Computer

Assembling your computer can seem daunting, but it's actually pretty easy. In lesson 3, we show you step-by-step how to put everything together.

Lesson 4: Installing Your Operating System

Once you've put it together, you're past the difficult portion. Lesson 4 deals with installing your operating system and get everything up and running.

Lesson 5: Further Resources

There's a lot more computer-building info out there than we can fit into one Night School. In our final lesson, we share some other resources that should help you in both the building and post-building steps.

If you'd like all of these lessons in a printable PDF file, click here to download one. That way you can take it with you to the store, to your workbench, or anywhere else you may need it. UPDATE: The PDF is now out of date, since we've added a number of small tweaks to this guide. If you want a more printable version of the guide, we recommend using something like Readability to print out the articles or save them to your phone/tablet.

Source: http://lifehacker.com/5828747/how-to-build-a-computer-from-scratch-the-complete-guide