This weekend gone by I did something I've never done before, something that I've always longed to do but - for a wide array of reasons - never did. I built my first PC.
Now I've never been much of a hardware guy (or just a "building" type of person in general). It took me a year of driving before I was comfortable enough to change oil, water, take off tires, etc. I usually just like to buy something that's already working and send it to get repaired if it breaks. This has it's major downfalls though and ended up being the main reason I built my PC.
Since I've been in college for the last four years, I rarely had enough money to buy the parts for a PC. Besides that, it just wasn't practical. I need to bring a laptop to college almost every day and frequently have to present projects built on it. That would be impossible if all I had was a PC at home. However, I'm in my final week of college now and have finally got a decent amount of money saved so it didn't feel impractical anymore.
With that, I went online to browse for parts. I followed close to twenty tutorials on how to choose parts, what to look out for, where to buy, how to fit them, and so on and so forth. Amazon was used for the bulk of the purchases since it's pretty dear to get items delivered to Ireland with other online retailers. In fairness to Amazon, I received everything I ordered in less than a week.
I aimed for a high performance machine that I intended to run Linux Mint on, maybe with Windows XP in a Virtual Machine for applications like Photoshop. I'm not much of a PC gamer, so the graphics card didn't need to be anything spectacular, though I still bought a pretty good one. Overall, the machine cost close to €1000 (excluding a monitor, which I already have).
This has been a great experience for me. The build process was a lot easier than I expected. I learned a lot about the inner workings of a PC and I now have one that matches my every need while being relatively simple to upgrade in the future.
