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Originally posted by Joeiss
Pika : Well, I am not sure if building my own PC would be the greatest thing to do. I am lazy, and I would much rather have a computer be delivered to my house all set up and ready to go. Dual processors? I have no need for that. "Go for 512 MB. Going over 700 MB is too much." Umm.... They have 1.o GB right now. Going over is too much? Or going over is not necassary, but will be great for later use?
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Yeah, you can get huge amounts of RAM if you want: the problem is as follows: your RAM controller (part of the northbridge). Lets face it, more RAM tends to make your computer faster cos it spends less time swapping to the hard disk (which slows you down immensely). However, after a certain point, your RAM controller slows the system down because the more and more RAM you get, the more and more time it spends searching through it.
With any half decent northbridge these days, using more than 700-1024 MB of RAM will slow your computer down.
And yeah, best way to get a good deal is to buy online from a vendor who will let you choose your own components. There's a company in the UK called
Eclipse Computing who basically let you choose your own components form their very comprehensive list, and they'll put the computer together for you. True, you'll have to do a bit of reasearch to see which is the best combination of components, but the tricky parts (like fitting the heatsink, argh!) will be done for you by someone else.
Another tip for a high quality computer is
avoid bundles like the plague. I for one would never ever buy a computer bundled with a shedload of free software I'm never going to use, nor ones that come with "free" scanners, printers etc. These deals are often ludicrously cheap; the important thing to remember is that if a deal sounds too good to be true, it almost certainly is. You really do get what you pay for. True, many vendors can undercut others by buying in bulk, but in most cases the cheapness of crap computers is solely due to substandard/missing components. I've used computers of the same spec as mine from "low quality" vendors, and my computer so rips them to shreds in terms of speed and liability it's not funny.
You might find the follwing two articles on the phenomenon of craputers useful:
http://www.cexx.org/craputer.htm
http://www.cexx.org/snicker/compaq.htm
You'll also save yourslef an awful lot of heartache if you actually buy the CD for your OS instead of relying on one that's preinstalled. Yes, I know it're more expensive (although I've heard you can pick up Windows 2000 for a song now), but it's far better than the crappy "recovery disks" provided by craputer vendors. It'll also mean you can be horribly illegal and install the OS on other PC's (unless you're running XP of course).
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dont try to put 1 together unless ur 100 percent positive u know wut ur doing.
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Well, IMO this is a bit of a misleading comment - putting a computer together isn't rocket science, it's more of a Lego kit. All you really need to know is if the components you've chosen are compatible (and it really takes quite an idiot not to notice compatability issues these days) and how they fit together - and if the components I've seen are anything to go by, the documantation included should be more than adequate. And even if it isn't, then there's plenty of online references.
Another good plus point for making your own computer is that you can recycle components from your current one (such as floppy/CD/DVD drives, or you can chuck in your old hard drive to extract the documents from it (don't use an old hard drive for anything critical, as they can break down afetr just a few years - buy a new one!). You'll also be able to use your existing monitor (unless it's fuxx0red), keyboard, mouse etc...
And words can't describe the "I made that" feeling once you've got it all put together and it boots for the first time.