Can you build a PC in under 30 minutes? That is the question that we keep asking ourselves. We believe that with the speed of tech, and the knowledge we have, we can put together a PC and have it loading the Windows desktop in under 30 minutes.

We have tried this before, you can view our first attempt here, in which we managed to get it working in about 35 minutes. That was with an early version of Windows 10. We were hoping that with the a new Samsung 960 Evo M.2 hard drive, better memory and the bigger space of doing it in our Boardroom would give us an advantage.

Watch the video below to see if we managed to complete our challenge.

We failed. We can put it down to 1 major issue, and one minor issue, which caused us to go over.

The minor issue was the fact that, with our previous attempt, we already had a monitor set up and ready to use. With this attempt, we had a brand-new monitor. We didn't have a HDMI cable ready and wasted precious minutes looking for one, only to find one in the box.

Yes, it was only a few minutes wasted, and in the end that wouldn't have mattered, but it's still time we could shave off.

The major issue we went over was waiting for Windows to load.

We loaded from a DVD, and the time it took to copy over to the PC killed us in the end. We estimate it probably took about 12 minutes just to copy files. That's over a third of our time gone, waiting.

In hindsight, we maybe should have run the install from a USB-3 device. The reason we didn't, was that neither of us had installed Windows 10 from a USB device recently, and were confident that we were not going to run into issues, so we went with something we knew.

Take that time we spent waiting out of the final time, and we easily beat our target. 

We will attempt this challenge again at some point in the future, and we will beat it, and based on the time it took us to do everything else, I realistically think we can get closer to 20 minutes than 30.

Until next time.....