PUT IT TOGETHER

SO YOU’VE GOT YOUR PC HOME AND PICKED UP ANY ADDITIONAL COMPONENTS YOU NEED.

Don’t rush into anything; this is a second-hand box, and you should treat it with suspicion. Contain your excitement, and inspect the internals thoroughly, making sure every cable is properly attached, and everything looks as it should before plugging in and powering up. Run the machine without your upgrades first, to ensure you won’t fry any new components, then add them once you’ve stress-tested the base model for a while.

Depending on where you’ve picked it up, you may be forced to refurbish the PC yourself. This isn’t difficult — it’s just a case of giving it a good clean — though be prepared to take it outdoors with a can of compressed air, because something that’s been running on a desk for five years is likely bursting with dust. Remove and hose down any heatsinks, allowing them to completely dry, to ensure they’re as effective as possible. Replace the thermal paste on the CPU, and reseat everything to ensure a solid connection.

When you start up, check to see if Windows automatically logs on to an existing user account. If you’re sent straight to the desktop rather than the first stage of Windows 10’s setup process, your seller hasn’t done their job properly. You’re probably going to want to reset the OS and start from scratch, because that cut-price machine could well be serving as a trojan horse from an unscrupulous individual. You might never know if there’s a keylogger — or worse — preinstalled in that user account. Resetting Windows should put everything back to defaults.