Building a computer from scratch gives you the perfect machine for your needs, but it can be daunting the first time around. Here's our complete guide, from picking the parts, to putting it together and installing your OS.


This Night School series was originally published in 2011. We've gone through and given it some much-needed updates: we changed outdated references, added some new resources and tools, and expanded a few sections. Enjoy!

For our first lesson in building your own PC, we start with a little computer hardware basics.


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

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.


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.


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 format, I recommend sending each article to a service like Readability or Pocket. That way, you can print out a clean, readable version that you can reference as you build. Thanks for learning with us this week!

Check out the full Lifehacker Night School series for more beginners lessons covering all sorts of topics.