In this three day, wireless security workshop, we will examine the cutting edge of wireless technologies. The purpose of the course is to give you a full understanding of what wireless (802.11) networks are, how they work, how people find them and exploit them, and how they can be secured. This hands-on course is based on real world examples, solutions, and deployments. In this course we will actually set up and use wireless networks, determine the tools to uncover wireless networks, and also look at how to defeat the attempts to secure wireless networks.

Course Completion
Upon the completion of our CISM course, students will have:

Constructed a wireless network architecture
Install and configure 802.1x authentication using Microsoft Windows IAS and Server 2000
Install a wireless access point
Distinguish between 802.11x standards
Defeat Wired Equivalent Privacy
Key Take Aways:

An understanding of wireless networks
A CD of common tools and documentation
An ability to search the internet for updates and more information on wireless networks
Detail of Course Content The following topics will be covered:

Wireless History
Radio Frequency (RF) Fundamentals
WLAN Infrastructure
802.11 Network Architecture
802.1X Authentication
Extensible Authentication Protocol (EAP)/(LEAP)/(PEAP)
Detection Platforms
WLAN Discovery Tools
Kismet
Wireless Sniffers
Conventional Detection
Antennas
Exploiting WLANs
Securing WLANs
Other Wireless Options
Legal Issues including GLBA and ISO-17799
Future
Resources

http://www.acquisitiondata.com/wireless_security.asp

Peltier Associates Breaking and Fixing Wireless Security is a post from: Ikuisuu Teen Technology Information Site

One of the biggest benefits of building your own computer is that you can customize it. You know what is most important to you. Maybe you are a graphics user. MP3s might be the closest thing you have to a best friend. Perhaps you are writing the great American novel and you are mainly interested in text. If you are building your own machine, you can concentrate on what you want but if you’re building it for a third party, you obviously need to consult them first.

Collecting the hardware for your new computer is the most time consuming part of the process. You want to make sure that you get high standard equipment that works well with your needs. Take your time and dont try to skimp on your hardware. If you dont heed both of these suggestions, your computer could bite back later.

If you are building your own PC, you probably know that the Motherboard is the most important part of your computer. Everything that you plug into your computer will meet here. Be especially choosy when buying a motherboard. And make sure that there is an instruction manual. Some cheapies will not have one.

Be aware that the Motherboard will control the future of your computer. All upgrades will have to be compatible with your Motherboard. The chipset in the Motherboard deserves careful investigation. What will it support? Find out before you buy. Take your time. There are a ton of chipsets out there.

Pay close attention to how many PCL slots the Mother board has. The more, PLC slots the better because they fill up quickly. How is the board laid out? Check for any problems such as something blocking your long PCI slots.

When selecting a case, be aware of the form factor. You want an ATX form factor because that is what almost all new systems are operating on. Try to go with a screw free form factor because it will be easier to work with. One equipped with fans would be optimal.

Three are three groups of processors; low end, average and high end. The low end processor is okay for simple tasks. Letters, invoices and other noncomplex applications can be performed on a low end processor. If you do choose to go with a low end processor, realize that these are fast becoming outdated.

Average processors are faster and they are just a bit more expensive. For a few extra dollars you will be able to access higher level applications without hassle. This will provide more speed as well satisfying the average computer user.

High end processors are the cream of the crop. They are expensive and usually reserved for those on the high end of the pay scale. You will have high memory and no problem accessing complex CPU programs.

Memory is a vital element of your computer. Spend the money and purchase the best you can afford. If you dont, more than likely you will need to go out and repurchase a better processor later. Also you will want to make sure you get memory that works with your system.

Get a video card that suits your purposes. If you are a small business owner, go with a cheaper, jack of all trades card. If you are building this computer for home use you might as well reward yourself with some perks. Now dont go and spend five hundred dollars on a video card that a top financial institution might buy. Purchase a card that provides just slightly more than you need, but not so high end that it cost as much as the rest of your hardware.

You have your mouse and keyboard, right? Get a good hard drive. Buy a new one, opposed to used, to make sure you are getting the best quality.

CD-ROM drivers are cheap. Spend a little extra cash and get a really good one. If you want a more advanced unit, buy a DVD player. A DVD player will play CD-ROMs and DVDs. It will serve multiple purposes.

Building a Computer From the Bottom Up is a post from: Ikuisuu Teen Technology Information Site

In most MMORPGs the player takes the role of his or her own character and must navigate some sort of world or realm in order to complete quests and tasks. Usually these worlds will be persistent, hosted on a permanent server, and actions taken by the players will have an affect on the realm or world. Thus making it interactive, even when the player is not playing the game. This is known as being “real time” and is how MMORPGs emulate the real world. In one particular instance in World of Warcraft, an event occurred where a spell effect which lowered the players health slowly over time was spread from player to player. The disease effect got out of hand and as players ran back to towns and cities the virus spread and became an epidemic. Later, a patch was released to remedy the problem, but the community was shocked at how closely the behaviour seen in the game resembled real life.

Most MMORPGs, such as World of Warcraft and Guildwars, are based in fantasy and myth and involve magic and spells. Some are based in space, where you must command a spacecraft or your own planet. Some are even based on the real world, and with the invention of Google maps it may well be possible to have an MMORPG world which closely emulates the real world, perhaps even being able to visit your own home!

MUDs, or Multi-User Dungeons, were the first MMORPGs. They are usually simple text based programs where the players use commands to control and interact with their character, the world, and other players. Although simple 2D graphical versions and even 3D MUDs do exist. Similar to MUDs are browser based MMORPGs, like RuneScape, which are played entirely in the users browser. They can be simple pages of text or complex 3D renderings and offer similar functionality of more developed MMORPGs, usually for free.

MMORPGs were virtually unknown a few years ago and now they are commonplace for most gamers. In fact worldwide revenues for MMORPGs exceeded half a billion dollars in 2005, and Western revenues exceeded one billion USD in 2006.

An Insider Look At MMORPG is a post from: Ikuisuu Teen Technology Information Site

With the older style and mechanics of hard drives, the RPM speed was low, meaning that the drives wouldnt overheat. The hard drives we use now days, have speeds between 7,200 and 10,000 RPM, meaning that they can get quite hot when they start working. Computers of this day and age come with fans to cool everything down, with most hard drives including temperature sensors as well, so you can keep track of just how hot your hard drive becomes.

With hard drives today, overheating is a very common problem. The faster hard drives come with speeds of 10,000 RPM, which can make the temperature soar above 70 degrees F, really heating things up inside the drive. The mechanics on the inside are built to withstand the heat, although if things become too hot, youll encounter problems. If a drive becomes too hot and ends up losing the data, it may be next to impossible to retrieve the information – no matter how good your data recovery specialists may be.

One area that suffers from the drive overheating is the platters, which are magnetic media. Platters are what carry the data throughout the hard drive. Platters are constructed from optical glass, aluminum, or ceramic and normally coated with a layer of magnetic material. Once the hard drive begins to heat up, the platters will start to expand, which changes their size. When this happens, the magnetic surface on the platters will get destroyed, which results in a loss of data. If the physical area of the platters are damaged, it will result in unreadable sectors.

Other areas of the hard drive that can be damaged due to overheating are the read and write heads, head actuator, and the controller chip. Hard drives are very sophisticated pieces of hardware, and cant handle overheating. The read and write heads are a common example, as they can easily render the drive useless if they become damaged.

To prevent your hard drive from overheating, you should always make sure that it is cooled properly and well ventilated. You can always get additional fans and coolers, which will improve both ventilation and the flow of air in your computer. You can buy fans and coolers at very affordable prices, which makes them an ideal investment for keeping your hard drive or hard drives cool.

You can also get software that monitors the temperature of your hard drive as well. Whether its software, or additional fans, you should always ensure that your hard drives are kept cool. By keeping them cool, youll greatly reduce the amount of crashes. Youll also increase the stability of your hard drive as well, which will make your entire computer perform much better.

How to Avoid Hard Drive Overheating is a post from: Ikuisuu Teen Technology Information Site

The Forward Explicit Congestion Notification (FECN, pronounced “feckon”) bit is set to zero by default, and will be set to 1 if congestion was experienced by the frame in the direction in which the frame was traveling. A DCE (frame relay switch) will set this bit, and a DTE (router) will receive it, and see that congestion was encountered along the frame’s path.

If network congestion exists in the opposite direction in which the frame was traveling, the Backward Explicit Congestion Notification (BECN, pronounced “beckon”) will be set to 1 by a DCE.

If this is your first time working with BECNs and FECNs, you might wonder why the BECN even exists – after all, why send a “backwards” notification? The BECN is actually the most important part of this entire process, since it’s the BECN bit that indicates to the sender that it needs to slow down!

For example, frames sent from Kansas City to Green Bay encounter congestion in the FR cloud. A Frame Switch sets the FECN bit to 1. In order to alert KC that it’s sending data too fast, GB will send return frames with the BECN bit set. When KC sees the BECN bit is set to 1, the KC router knows that the congestion occurred when frames were sent from KC to GB.

Frame Relay BECN Adaptive Shaping allows a router to dynamically throttle back on its transmission rate if it receives frames from the remote host with the BECN bit set. In this case, KC sees that the traffic it’s sending to GB is encountering congestion, because the traffic coming back from GB has the BECN bit set. If BECN Adaptive Shaping is running on KC, that router will adjust to this congestion by slowing its transmission rate. When the BECNs stop coming in from GB, KC will begin to send at a faster rate.

BECN Adaptive Shaping is configured as follows:

KC(config)#int s0

KC(config-if)#frame-relay adaptive-shaping becn

To see how many frames are coming in and going out with the BECN and FECN bits set, run show frame pvc.

R3#show frame pvc

< some output removed for clarity >

input pkts 306 output pkts 609 in bytes 45566

out bytes 79364 dropped pkts 0 in FECN pkts 0

in BECN pkts 0 out FECN pkts 0 out BECN pkts 0

in DE pkts 0 out DE pkts 0

out bcast pkts 568 out bcast bytes 75128

pvc create time 01:26:27, last time pvc status changed 01:26:27

Just watch the “in”s and “out”s of BECN, FECN, and DE in both the exam room and your production networks!

Cisco CCNA / CCNP Certification Exam: Frame Relay BECNs and FECNs is a post from: Ikuisuu Teen Technology Information Site

Technology has grown by leaps and bounds, especially in the last two decades. From faxes to cellular phones and the dawning of the computer age, changes that have affected phones in general, but particularly business phones, have been varying and abundant. Looking at other industries where technology has influenced design and protocols, one can easily see that not all manufacturers share the same competitiveness that business phone manufacturers share in relation to keeping their products as current as possible. Digital telephones were available before the digital alarm clock, digital wrist watch or the digital thermostat.

While it could be argued for the digital alarm clock or the digital wrist watch that this is simply a matter of function not really benefitting form, I doubt that anyone would dispute the exclusion of the thermostat in that description. Like the digitalization of the telephone, digitalized thermostats offer options that were not possible prior to the conversion. From the ability to adjust temperature settings based on time to the increased level of accuracy, digitalization has offered great benefits to this particular product. Why then, were products such as these so much slower than the business telephone to adopt digitalization?

It is more a testament to the dedication of telephone equipment manufacturers than it is a knock on other product manufacturers. The telephone business is highly competitive, and the ultimate beneficiary of this competitiveness is the consumer. Whatever changes lie ahead for technology, you can be certain that business phone manufacturers will incorporate those changes into their products.

Business Phones Keep Up With Changes In Technology is a post from: Ikuisuu Teen Technology Information Site

Microsoft Dynamics CRM 3.0 Small Business Edition is designed to work with other Microsoft applications such as Microsoft Small Business Server 2003, Outlook, Word, Excel and Publisher. Working together, the Microsoft Dynamics Suite greatly helps your staff to build closer customer relationships and achieve new levels of productivity and profitability.

Here are 5 ways Microsoft Dynamics Suite can help your small business save time and money:

1. Centralize all your customer information

Microsoft Dynamics Suite captures all customer contact information from your sales, marketing and support sections of your business and houses the information in a central repository. Microsoft Dynamics CRM v3.0 provides instant access to whoever needs the information, wherever they are and when they need it. This reduces costs by minimizing non-productive time wasted, increases profitability by maximizing cross-selling opportunities and enhances customer relations with a more personalized approach from all staff in contact with customers.

2. Protect your customer information

Microsoft Dynamics CRM v3.0 has built-in security features to ensure your customer information is protected and kept confidential. Employees are only given access to that information on a customer that is required for the role they need to perform. By combining Microsoft Dynamics CRM v3.0 with Small Business Server, a powerful firewall is provided that allows mobile employees and remote locations to have secure and enhanced access to customer information while out of the office. The ability for mobile and remote workers to access customer information out of the office allows them to continue to be supported and productive as well as spend more time where they need to be with customers and prospects.

3. Integrate with Microsoft Office Outlook

Microsoft Dynamics CRM v3.0 has been designed with Outlook in mind, and can be enabled to let your employees work directly from their Outlook email client. This close integration with Outlook and other Microsoft applications such as Word and Excel means that all staff with client contact can look up customer information, manage email communications, arrange appointments, record customer and prospect contacts from within Outlook and share this across the business with the Microsoft Dynamics Suite. This makes staff more productive, generating greater revenues and reducing time wastage dealing with administrative customer affairs.

4. Tailor Microsoft Dynamics Suite to your small business

The Microsoft Dynamics Suite contains a configuration wizard so you can tailor the customer relationship software solution to meet the particular needs of your business. You can customize and modify forms, construct your own data entry fields and arrange how information is to be presented while an intuitive engine allows for automation of repetitive tasks. An alert system raises flags when you need to perform a task so nothing need ever fall down between the cracks.

Microsoft Dynamics Suite is an out-of-the-box solution that is quickly and cheaply implemented while maintenance costs are also minimal. The Microsoft Dynamics Suite is also scaleable to meet the future demands of your business with additional features that can be added as and when the need arises.

5. Fast and simple implementation gets you up and running quickly

Microsoft Dynamics CRM v3.0 has a very fast and simple set-up to speed up productivity and profitability, this minimizes business disruption. For existing users of Microsoft Office applications, the customer relationship software solution is readily adopted by your staff as it has been designed to look and feel like all other Office applications so use is intuitive.
This minimizes the costs of implementation and user adoption while at the same time increases productivity with minimal business disruption and faster adoption by employees.

5 Ways Microsoft Dynamics CRM V3.0 Can Save Your Small Business Time And Money is a post from: Ikuisuu Teen Technology Information Site

My current favorite five new PsCS3 features in order are:

1. Nondestructive Smart Filters
2. Quick Selection Tool & Refine Edge
3. Photomerge with advanced alignment and blending
4. Automatic layer alignment and blending
5. Vanishing Point with adjustable angle

Feature Overviews:

* Nondestructive Smart Filters

Adobe has finally given us non-linear, nondestructive filters. Can I just say “HOORAY!” In the past, you applied filters and effects in a linear order: one filter would alter your image, and the second filter would alter your now altered image, and a third filter would alter the altered altered image. The problem with that workflow is that if you decide you want to slightly tweak the second filter, you’d have to either undo back to that point (losing your subsequent edits), or use the history palette to step directly “back in time” to the point before you added the second filter, add your “revised” second filter and then add your third manually. All too often, you don’t quite remember what exact parameters you had set on that third one – or worse, your real world project involved applying 20 filters instead of the 3 in my example and changing the second filter would mean redoing the 18 that follow it. What a drag. Because of this issue, people developed many work arounds (often involving saving off multiple “partially completed” versions of files all over your hard drive with iterative file names, hoping that if you needed to go back to a certain point in time you’d be able to figure out where you needed to be), and while these workarounds were clever and well-conceived in many cases, there was a perfect, real solution, waiting to happen.

The real solution to all this is what we have been given in CS3: Nondestructive Smart Filters. In this new version, each filter and effect that you apply to a layer, remains live and continually re-editable, in real time, and the parameters that you adjust will all cascade down through whatever subsequent filters or effects you might have added to your layer. These are savable, movable, copy and pastable, and most importantly scalable.

* Quick Selection tool & Refine Edge

A design mentor of mine once told me “Photoshop is all about the selection. You select something, and then you do something with the selection. Nothing more, nothing less. Remember that, and you’ll never go wrong using this app.” Almost 10 years later, I must say she was absolutely correct. Using Photoshop is all about “the selection.” There are more tools in Photoshop for selecting than for any other single task.

As in just about every version of Photoshop that has ever been released, CS3 has made even greater strides in the area of “making your selection” than comes to memory in recent years. The new Quick Selection Tool used in combination with the Refine Edge palette is about the most helpful and clean way of selecting the edges of an object in your image that I have ever seen. This new revised Quick Selection tool is so smooth. You basically set the parameters of your Quick Selection tool – as if it were a brush – and paint the general area of your image edges (like trying to select just a kid and his soccer ball out of the photo of the big game) and Photoshop is watching what you do, and interpreting what you consider to be the general edges of what you are wanting to select and it figures out what’s kid and ball and what’s grass and goal posts and sky and crowd and selects just what you want it to. It’s VERY fast and clean. Then, you can invoke the Refine Edge palette, and you have seemingly infinite control over exactly how the edges of that selection behave. Check out the palette to the right to get an idea of what you could do to “refine” that edge. With radius, feathering, smoothing, and various display settings, I believe this new combo will cut down on my masking and selecting time in a quantifiable way.

* Photomerge with advanced alignment and blending

Ever tried to stitch together a series of images that you took, that you intended to “put together” into a panorama? Even with some of the stand alone tools that have been available over the yearseven those for doing quicktime VR’sare clunky and difficult to use – with mixed results at times. I have always wanted something built into Photoshop to let me do these “photo merges” – I never expected that Photoshop would actually be able to automatically do it for me. This feature floored me. The technologies involved in my number four choice “Automatic layer alignment and blending” are at work here in this feature as well, and the new auto layer alignment features in CS3 are far-reaching and crop up again and again in different areas of the application. It’s really one of the revolutionary things about this new version.

All of the things that have made making panoramas a difficult task in the past are all done automatically. The primary among these being 1. those times when you have to actually distort, rotate, skew or transform one of your elements because the perspective is screwy, 2. those times when the sun or lighting or a window made the white balance, color space or over all wash of brightness and contrast different from one image to the next (especially when doing 360′s) and of course 3. actually finding and aligning those overlapping areas of consecutive elements. Photoshop CS3 does these all for you and with surprisingly amazing results. It’s not just about the typical “panorama” either… I saw a demo of someone standing “too close” to a building, and taking pictures zoomed all the way out, of the front door, windows and window-boxes, front brick walk way, tilting upward and taking a picture of the balcony and roof line of the second floor – in other words, many elements that were WAY out of whack in terms of perspective, lighting and color space, and these 4 or 5 images were distorted, tweaked, rotated, matched, blended, lighting and color density matched… and I was amazed in like 5 seconds, there was this “wide angle” almost “fisheye” photomerge of the front of the building, from brick walkway to roof-line, and it looked incredible.

* Automatic layer alignment and blending

Another powerful application of this new alignment and blending technology is with a series or stack of images of the same subject. Let’s say you wanted to take a picture of a statue in a park somewhere, or a huge fountain, or the front of a monument or building. There are always people walking through the frame – if you can’t close down the area and still need a picture of the statue, in the park, in it’s beautiful setting, but with no people or birds or random elements – what are you to do? In the past, it was a painstaking process of shooting a bunch of images, selecting the “closest” one to your vision of a nice, clean, tourist-less frame, and begin the hours and hours of painting, cloning, healing, brushing etc., to remove all of your “randoms.” There are artists who are very good at this process, but I’m fairly certain they would agree that if there was a way to not have to spend all that time, they’d take it. Well, it’s here. Photoshop CS3 can take your stack of images and by analyzing all of them, figure out which things are permanent (things that appear in all the images like that building in the distance, the big tree, the sidewalk, and which parts of the image are obscured in one of the frames but not all of them, are healed automatically by borrowing pixels from other images in the stack and building an advanced composite of all the images and doing 90% or more of the work for you. There’s even a set of “fuzziness” sliders letting you say “eleminate things that are in X% of the images in the stack or less.” This is so impressive to see in action. You have to try it on some of your own images. It’s really hard to believe that it’s this easy to do this sort of process now. This is one of those new areas that I’m sure we’ll see artists finding incredibly creative ways to utilize this feature. Again, this one floored me when I first saw it.

* Vanishing Point with adjustable angle

One of the most powerful new features of Adobe CS2 was the vanishing point feature. One limitation it had was that you only had one set of right angles to work with in the vanishing point interface. Adobe took it one exponential step further by adding multiple, adjustable angle perspective planes to this vanishing point feature. What this enables you to do is copy, paste and clone in far more complex image planes than just the “clone parts of a building in perspective” job that the first iteration of this feature offered (impressive and powerful, but not very flexible). One of the big examples Adobe is pushing with this feature is to simulate 3D packaging and work on multiple planes at various angles in the same image. Like an open box for a new product, or even for experimenting with your final package art by seeing it in its real-world context. Again I think this feature has so many far reaching implications for inventors, prototypers, 3D modelers, visual effects artists… and can give Photoshop artists the ability to render full blown mockups of product packaging art for clients in a whole new way – getting us to sign-off, green-light and on to the next project at hand much more quickly. I like that a lot.

There are numerous new features in the application, especially when you dig down deep into the Photoshop Extended editions (sounds like a Peter Jackson DVD…) and as the week progresses here, I’d like to look into some of what PsCS3 Extended has to offer. The versions of PsCS3 that are available are the Film & Video, Medical & Science, AEC (Architecture, Engineering & Construction), and Manufacturing editions.

Adobe Photoshop CS3: Top 5 Standout New Features is a post from: Ikuisuu Teen Technology Information Site

First let me point out Im one of those life-long students. Not because if love college, but because I can never make up my mind on what I want to do. After making some big life changes I decided to take a full year away from school. Yesterday I attempted to register for this coming spring semester to get back on track. Interestingly enough my account has been disabled sort of… This is where the fun starts.

I expected my account to be disabled, that isnt the issue here. The problem is how it was disabled, and the messages which I received back from the University. First my account still worked to access class registration, and the University portal but my E-Mail had been completely locked out. This is the main point of my concern. If the university had a unified technology structure the login / password information would be centralized. An account disabled one place should be disabled across campus. Instead some departments disabled my account, and other left it running while I was gone. Worst some parts of the university left it partially running, but unusable.

Strange isnt it? Why not completely disable my account rather then just PRETEND it works only to give me a nasty permissions error when I attempt to USE the portal which I am already logged into.

Rule #1

Never let the user see the nasty error.

Building an application or networked system on any level requires more then just getting the job done. A developer should take the additional time to build functionality for the unexpected. In my case there should have been two things.

A friendly message explaining why my account was disabled and directions on how to re-enable my account.

Rule #2

Avoid the circle of death; take personal responsibility for the problem.

First I talked to my counselor who said I should talk to computer services. Computer services told me to talk to the registration office. The registration office told me to talk to my counselor. FAIL, never ending loops are bad, not just in programming but in the real world.

This could have been avoided at each step, but instead the problem was passed onto someone else. All someone had to do was research the problem, and they would have known the problem has come up in the past. The eventually solution was to force someone to register my classes over the phone rather then using my account on the Internet.

Rule #3

Record problems and make proactive steps to resolve known issues.

I work in IT and I know how incredibility complicated things can get. But its important to always take steps to prevent the situation from coming up again. I am sure that I am not the first person to have their account disabled, and because no one is following rule three; I will likely not be the last. A few simple changes to the application would easily fix the problem, but no one cares enough to do anything about it. This means me, THE CUSTOMER, THE STUDENT, THE IDOIT, to run around trying to convenience people to do their job.

Thanks for the warm welcome back akron,

Password Unification is a post from: Ikuisuu Teen Technology Information Site

CPU
The first thing you should pick out about your computer is what CPU you are going to use, because it determines what motherboard you are going to get, which determines what other components you get. There are two main CPU manufactruers, Intel and AMD. Both have their Pros and Cons, but they are pretty similar. I would suggest using AMD, because they give you a little more bang for the buck.

Here is a brief overview of the diffrent Intel and AMD CPUs:
Budget: AMD: Sempron
Intel: Celeron D

Midrange: AMD: Athlon 64
Intel: Pentium 4

High End: AMD: Athlon64 X2
Intel: Pentium D

If you are spending below $500, I would suggest a budget proccesor, Between $500 and $1000, midrange and $1000 and above I would suggest a high end proccessor.

Motherboard
Choosing the right motherboard is vital to building your computer. First, make sure you find a motherboard that has the right socket type for your CPU. Then, check the diffrent features of the motherboards you are looking at. If you arent going to buy a video or sound card, make sure your motherboard has onboard video and/or sound. Other things to check for on your motherboard are the hard drive interface, graphics card interface, expansion slots, the memory size and speed. Also, check for the chipset. There are too many to talk about, but generally Intel and nVidia chipsets are better than the other ones. Now that you picked out your motherboard, you know what to look for in your other components.

RAM
Getting the right speed and amount of RAM is vital to the speed and stability of your system. If you are running XP, you will probably need at least 256 or 512Mb of RAM. If you are going to be doing anything memory intensive, gaming, rendering or just want a faster computer, you should get 1Gb. Make sure your motherboard has enough DIMMs and the right type of DIMMs for your RAM. Also, be sure to check the speed and CAS Latency.

Hard Drive
Now its time to pick your hard drive. There are few variables in picking a hard drive. The first, and most important is size, 120Gb is usually enough for most people unless, you are going to be storing alot of pictures and video. Also, make sure you get an HD with the right interace that fits your motherboard. Almost all motherboards have IDE, but some have SATA (Serial ATA) Which is a much faster hard drive interface and uses a thinner cable which helps with airflow in your case. There is even SATAII now, which is twice as fast. Also look at speed, almost all desktop HDs are 7200RPM and Cache, most are 8Mb, dont buy a HD below those standards. If you want to spend some money, you can get 2 HDs and run them in RAID which increases performance.

Video Cards
If you are going to be doing any gaming, be sure to buy a video card, if youre not, onboard video is fine. The first thing to check for is the interface, most are AGP or PCI-E. I personally like nVidia cards better. If you are going to be doing graphic intensive games, I would suggest at least a 6600. If you have alot to spend, go with a 7800.

Optical/Floppy drives
Another thing you are going to is a CD drive, most are IDE. Get a DVD Burner if you are going to use it. Also, you should get a floppy drive, they are only $10ish and you might need it to install drivers when building your computer.

Case and Power Supply
Make sure you have a sufficient power supply!! If you have a high end computer, you should get a 450W PSU. Otherwise, 350W should be fine for most people. Most cases are ATX, but make sure it is the same type as your motherboard (ATX, MicroATX, BTX, etc…).

Be sure to make sure all your components are compatible!

Building A Computer – Picking Components is a post from: Ikuisuu Teen Technology Information Site