Upping Your Computer Game

Hey kids, it’s me Bush subbing in for my girl Casey once again!

So look – My friends always ask me a ton of questions when they decide to buy a computer. And I usually answer all of them with the same response…

Don’t buy a computer – Build your own.

Unless you’re trying to hook yourself up with a laptop, you really should build your own computer. Most of the benefits of building your own computer are lost when you’re dealing with laptops. Benefits like what? –

1. PRICE – If you want to have a quality computer, it will be cheaper to build one yourself. Outside of the software that goes on your computer, (XP and Word I’m talking about which you probably have lying around anyway), spending $500 on your own computer will go farther than $500 when you buy a computer from a retailer.
2. QUALITY – That $500 often doesn’t get you the best parts when you’re buying a Dell or an eMachine or whatever the brand of the day is. When you pick your own parts, you make the decisions on what goes in so you get the benefit of reading QUALITY reviews from power computer builders.
3. UPGRADEABILITY(sp) – This is a HUGE one that plays both into price and quality. The worse thing about buying a retail computer is that you can’t do much to it. When you build your own computer, you can upgrade basically everything AND you have the space in your computer case to do it (since custom cases are a lot roomier than retail computers). You can buy HDs, more RAM, a faster CPU, WHATEVER – And extend your computer a lot LOT longer.
4. KNOWLEDGE is POWER – Computer retail/repair people are essentially the mechanics of the tech world. What this means is they can charge you outrageous prices for basically NOTHING. If your computer goes down and you need to give it to them to “recover” it, they’ll do no more than put in the original XP disc but often charge you an arm and a leg for it. When you build your own computer, you take that power away from them. If something goes wrong, you can fix it yourself AND for COST. (meaning just the price of the parts)

So I think that list is enough right? It seems these days all I do is build computers and I just finished a build for a friend of mine – Decent HD, Core 2 Duo CPU, 2 GB Ram… And look, if you ever want some help bulidng your own rig – just e-mail me! I LOVE doing this stuff!