Never Again

by Walter
(Philippines)

It started all after I purchased a package computer i.e. desktop, monitor, keyboard, and mouse.
Later I discovered that I was fooled completely by the computer store. I paid $400 for a system that worth only $200! On top of that, the hardwares of the system were bound to become obsolete real soon.
Well, that was when I was still an ignorant fool about computers. But it was then that I’ve started to contemplate about building my own system. Never to get wrong the next time!
Honestly I didn’t read books or magazines on how to build one. One day I searched in Google and your site was the first one to appear. From then on, your site has been the valuable and biggest source of information I needed.
I’ve targeted the $400 system with only my own effort, I want to confirm if I could build a decent one with this amount.
Alas! Let’s see what I have bought for my $400:

1. AMD Athlon64 X2 4200+ Dual-core processor
2. Asus M2A-VM DDR2/PCIE/SATA/Raid Motherboard
3. LiteOn DVD-R/CD-RW IDE
4. ATI-Radeon HD2400XT 512MB Video Card
5. Seagate 160GB 7200RPM Hard disk
6. Kingston 667MHz 1GB DDR2 RAM
7. Logitech basic keyboard and mouse
8. Generic ATX/PSU 500Watts
9. Samsung Syncmaster 17” CRT Monitor

It took me about 2 hours to complete the assemble of components into the ATX case. And it took about 4 hours to install the operating system and the system drivers. A very tiring experience but it’s fulfilling and worthwhile. Finally, I made a system that enable to play games at a decent speed and working with other applications without too much queue on the line.