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Before you start any assembly, you should make sure you have all the tools you will need. Any reasonable amount of work building, upgrading, troubleshooting or repairing PCs will require a good tool kit. The proper tools can save you time and help you avoid damage to your equipment. Below is a list of the items that I would recommend that you have handy.

Highly Recommended Items To Have:

• Screwdriver: You'll need some sort of screwdriver to open the cases of most PCs and to add or remove expansion cards inside the PC. Get both a Phillips screwdriver and a medium-sized flathead screwdriver. Some computers also use special star-headed screws called Torque screws, so if your computer uses these special screws, you need a Torque screwdriver. Three-eighth-inch screwdrivers are best. A magnetic screwdriver will help prevent screws falling into your computer, and they are useful to get to those drives mounted deep in your system.
• Small Flathead Screwdriver: You'll need a small, flathead screwdriver about 1/8-inch across. You'll mainly use it to tighten cables attached to serial, parallel, and other ports. It is also helpful for removing memory chips and setting various switches.
• Needle-Nose Pliers: These pliers are great for grasping small items and for removing and replacing jumpers on circuit boards.
• Chip Puller: Good for extracting a processor when you want to replace it or for removing memory chips--although with newer kinds of memory, you won't necessarily need this tool for that.
• Wire Snips: Useful to have a pair of wire snips for cutting wire and stripping insulation.
• Small Flashlight: A flashlight is necessary to see inside PC cases, which can be quite dark, and there are small items you will need to see, such as the "pin 1" marking on a connector.
• Tweezers: These are good for holding small objects and for changing settings on an expansion board. Get the cross-locked kind.
• Black Electrical Tape: Handy for wrapping wire ends and insulating components.
• Pickup Tool: Screws and other small objects have a nasty habit of falling into the insides of your PC--often in places where they can't be retrieved, such as between two expansion boards. With a pickup tool, you'll be able to grab them. You push the knob at one end of this flexible tool, and wire claws extend from the other end. You then surround what's fallen; with the claws, slowly retract the knob, and the tool grabs the runaway screw.
• Can of Compressed Air: Use the compressed air to clean things without using any damaging liquids.
• Soft, Lint-Free Cloth: For cleaning the monitor and other components.
• ESD (Electrostatic Discharge) Wrist Strap: Static electricity you pick up could seriously damage some components of your computer. To make sure you don't zap an electronic part, wear a wrist strap. You wrap it around your wrist and then attach the other end to a grounded piece of metal, such as a metal table leg.
• Nut Driver: Many screws used in a PC also have hexagonal heads, so a hexagonal-head nutdriver will work on them; in fact, they often work better because it surrounds the head of the screw, making it less likely that a slip will strip the screw head. A 1/4-inch nutdriver is your best bet because it's a standard size for computer equipment.
• Knife: A cutting blade or utility knife of some type.

Miscellaneous Spare Parts That Can Come In Handy:

• Screws: A big bag of screws of all shapes and sizes can come in handy.
• Expansion Card Inserts: Metal inserts that come out of the back of the case when you put a modem or other card into the PC, as you may need them later.
• Drive Faceplates: Plastic faceplates that you remove from the front of cases so you can replace them later if needed.
• Mounting Kits: These let you put a 3.5" drive into a 5.25" bay and can be useful when your case has more free 5.25" bays than 3.5" ones.
• Cables: Power, IDE, floppy, CD-ROM, or other cables that you accumulate in case you need them later.
• Keyboard, Mouse, 3.5" Floppy Drive: Keep an extra one of each of these components around to aid in troubleshooting problems by swapping.

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