Some of the records of the history of my computer rig are fuzzy, particularly around here, but I’ll piece together what I can so that you’ve got the best background possible.

One evening around the start of winter 2013, eleven-year-old me is sat in my bedroom at dad’s house browsing the internet on a Toshiba Satellite C660D. While I’m probably looking up my favourite Minecraft mods of the time, I’m also thinking along the lines of “this computer isn’t very good, it can barely run my favourite games” and I start to wonder “what if I can make my own laptop?”

I had remembered previously that my uncle had promised, but was unable to fulfill, a computer that I could keep and change parts on - a Dell XPS 420 that ran Windows Vista along with an embedded Windows SideShow screen. Thinking of this is what made me begin to consider the possibilities of making my own computers or laptops. What I never realised is how big this project would become for me.

I’ve already tried things on this laptop such as installing Ubuntu 12.04 with their now-defunct WUBI loader, trying it out, and not really understanding it, but I had never looked into doing anything hardware-related with a computer. So I started doing some research over the coming days through various highly technical Google searches such as “how to build laptop”, and upon realising most places having recommended against that, then searching for “how to build computer” in general. I landed on a few forums, some Wikipedia pages, but the most important in all of these were the YouTube videos I found on actually building computers. After watching and reading enough to become confident enough, I started doing some research on the parts that I should get.

As a now twelve-year-old, I had made a choice of parts through PCPartPicker and was now pooling together the pocket money I was getting and saving up for each individual part to buy one at a time. My requirements were very simple - cheap and turns on. And having let my parents know what I was planning to do, I ask them to buy the first two parts - the motherboard and the case.

And now, phase one of the computer build project begins.