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Go to Wal-Mart and buy an off the shelf Dell or HP that will suit your needs. Back up your stuff regularly and in about 3 years the machine will die.
You got your money's worth for the price you paid!

They are so cheap now it is not worth trying to buy or build one that you hope will last much longer than 3 years. Usually it is the Hard Drive that goes first due to excessive heat. You can mitigate this my blowing out all the dust every 3 months or so and keep the air circulation at it's best.

Being somewhat of a "computer person" myself I shutter at the idea of buying a computer at Wal-Mart, or any high end electronics. Especially if you're not someone in-the-know for such purchases you'd probably be better off at least going to best buy or an electronics specialty store where the staff will be much more knowledgeable.

It sounds like the author might be at least a little knowledgeable about such things if s/he is talking about individual components. I always get Asus mother boards when when building my own. Great quality, lots of features. I'm an AMD man myself. For RAM pay a little more and get something from Crucial. Harddrivves I would say Maxtor or Western Digital.

Definitely back up b/c your hard drive WILL FAIL. I have an external Western Digital My Book. It's two 500 GB internally so you can either configure it as a single terabyte or as a mirrored system where you "only" get 500 GB effective storage but everything's written twice so if one drive fails you can recover.

I write this post on a Dell Laptop. If you just want a quick buy then go to dell direct, good stuff if you aren't too worried about specifics such as motherboards and the like.

I would have to agree with the posters who said don't build it yourself. While there's nothing wrong with building it yourself, there are some advantages to buying a 'store bought' system.

First off, assembling a PC isn't all that difficult, but there are some things you need to know about matching system boards with processors and memory, the type of expansion cards you need, the types your motherboard supports, bus speeds, etc. Chances are, you'll get the right components and everything is fine. On the other hand, choosing the wrong components can make the system flaky, not run at all, or worse, damage your equipment. Then there's the task of configuring and tweaking the components to run properly with the other components.

In my opinion, you get a good component-matched system when you buy off-the-shelf name brand boxes. You may not get the highest performance gaming system, but it will be a good system. If something breaks, you'll have a warranty. You'll go to a single support source regardless of which component breaks, rather than having 10 different manufacturers to speak to (hopefully in English) when diagnosing a problem or trying to get a warranty return.

The headaches associated with building it yourself are not worth the benefits. I've been working with computers since the late 70s, and I'd much prefer to buy a machine that works out of the box. My time is too valuable to waste saving 20 bucks building it myself.

Dell is a good system. You might also look at Sony, Acer, Gateway and HP (not necessarily in that order). If you're looking to save a little money and not interested in the latest-greatest, check out http://www.tigerdirect.com. They frequently sell one year old off-lease name brand systems at very reasonable prices.

Good luck.

Depends what you are buying. Portable? Gaming? desktop replacement.
I like Dell, Sony, HP and Asus....

I just broke down and bought a Thin and light Dell XPS M1330 with wled backlit lcd monitor/ t7250 core 2 duo 2.00MHz 8oo FSB/3 gigs of ram/160gb 7200rpm HDD/ finger print reader/bluetooth/ slot loading dvd +_ DL burner/ nvidia gforce 8400m GS/ Creative Sound Blaster X-fi Extreme audio notebook express card.

So far I'm loving it

rbraughn wrote:I just broke down and bought a Thin and light Dell XPS M1330 with wled backlit lcd monitor/ t7250 core 2 duo 2.00MHz 8oo FSB/3 gigs of ram/160gb 7200rpm HDD/ finger print reader/bluetooth/ slot loading dvd +_ DL burner/ nvidia gforce 8400m GS/ Creative Sound Blaster X-fi Extreme audio notebook express card.

KC5AV wrote:

rbraughn wrote:I just broke down and bought a Thin and light Dell XPS M1330 with wled backlit lcd monitor/ t7250 core 2 duo 2.00MHz 8oo FSB/3 gigs of ram/160gb 7200rpm HDD/ finger print reader/bluetooth/ slot loading dvd +_ DL burner/ nvidia gforce 8400m GS/ Creative Sound Blaster X-fi Extreme audio notebook express card.

Down boy! Down!!!

Somebody get a towel here??? We might get a short or something soon!!!

rbraughn wrote: I just broke down and bought a Thin and light Dell XPS M1330 with wled backlit lcd monitor/ t7250 core 2 duo 2.00MHz 8oo FSB/3 gigs of ram/160gb 7200rpm HDD/ finger print reader/bluetooth/ slot loading dvd +_ DL burner/ nvidia gforce 8400m GS/ Creative Sound Blaster X-fi Extreme audio notebook express card.

So far I'm loving it

In the words of Paris Hilton, That's hott!