I think it’s safe to say that everyone is familiar with the intricately-crafted history surrounding the Bionicle universe. Their endless struggle against the Brotherhood of Makuta. The devastating battle against the vicious Bohrok swarm. The list goes on. Now, you may be asking, “Where did the Bionicles come from and how does one assemble a Bionicle?” to which I’d respond, “I’ve never actually seen or interacted with Bionicles, but I imagine it’s like building your own personal computer.”
Originally I had planned on writing about how to build your own computer from scratch, but the scope of the post kept ballooning with little addendums that popped into my head, i.e. “What warrants needing a higher-end computer? Do I need to explain what each connector does? Do I need to go over the details of dual rank memory?”, etc.
So I decided instead to provide some HOTT tips to act as a sidecar for the plethora of other guides available on the internet surrounding this topic.
- Wear a grounding strap to avoid shorting your motherboard with static electricity like Will did 10 years ago in his college dorm.
- Make sure the case you buy has plenty of spots to mount fans to avoid having to leave the case open all the time like Will had to do in college (no wonder the case cost $90 with a $90 mail-in rebate).
- Make sure to avoid using too much thermal compound between the CPU to avoid it leaking into the motherboard socket.
- Don’t forget to get confused when the manual describes how to hook up the case connectors to the motherboard like everyone else who has built a computer.
- An important thing to note is to unplug all hard drives when installing Windows except for the one that you explicitly want Windows installed on to avoid the installer bugging out and overwriting 800GB of old data like Will did back in 2012.
- Definitely do not order a power supply that has a form factor that isn’t compatible with your case like Will did one time.
- Make sure to not be Will circa 2007-2012.
I guess my point is that building a computer can be fun and exciting! Just don’t be surprised when it doesn’t boot up the first time you hit the power button because you accidentally plugged the connector for it into the pins for the front-facing USB ports.