Challenge: Build a working computer in 30 minutes

How long does it take to build a PC? How quickly can you build a PC? These are the questions bandied around the office recently.

Julian claimed that we could build one in 30 minutes, which sounded like a decent challenge, and with the office having a new PC requirement, we decided the challenge should include opening and unpacking a sealed from delivery box as well (with fingers crossed that we bought everything we needed.)

The box arrived, we gathered everything else we needed like power cables, screwdrivers, monitor, keyboard, mouse and a copy of Windows 10 technical preview.

“What’s the point of doing all of this if you are just going to blog about it?” we thought. So we set up a 4K Camera with time-lapse capability to film everything, with two more HD cameras at the ready to film other angles and close-ups.

The 4K camera was positioned on a tripod with a good view of our workspace, and we stuck a timer on a Nexus 7 to display our current progress.

Everything went pretty well, the motherboard was new to us so we had to open the manual for that (kind of cheating) and the only real issue being that the main camera used up all its storage mid-way through the shoot, so we had to down tools and empty the memory card before resuming. This lost us a few minutes, but we were soon back on track and had it built swiftly, with the windows install being fairly easy once we had managed to get the new PC to boot off the DVD and start installing, even a non functioning SATA cable didn't hold us back too much.

Overall, we did this in a decent time, which would be hard to beat, maybe having unpacked everything beforehand would have saved some time, but we liked having this as part of the challenge. Tearing (carefully) into the packaging at breakneck speed was kind of fun. We would also have saved time not having to clear a cameras storage card mid way through, but it added to the excitement (or panic...)

View the video below to see the final results. Music was supplied kindly by Emperor the Stag..