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RIP PC — 6 Comments

  1. I did a lot of searching to see where I could save money by purchasing a part separately and installing it myself. I don’t like messing with installing the CPU to the motherboard, but I can easily handle some RAM and a video card. I had them build the PC with a cheap hard drive and then bought an SSD from Newegg. I ordered half the RAM I wanted and got the rest from Newegg. I bought my video card from Amazon.

  2. Our current PC is 8 years old, and we bought it from a certain major PC manufacturer online (name rhymes with Mewlet-Mackard). It lasted us fairly well over the years, but the bloatware is pretty annoying. With the replacement of the hard drive with an SSD, the old PC has gained some extra pep and will be usable for some years to come.

    That being said, I realize that I gave up some customization options by going with this particular vendor.

    Ironically enough, Linus of Linus Tech Tips ran a multi-webisode series about a year or two ago about buying from various pre-built vendors: their buying process, their help desk performance, etc. The series starts here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rzpYkpZX8qw and is a four part series. I don’t think they bought from Microcenter, so I can’t speak to their house built PCs at all, but I’ve had hit-or-miss advice from their salespeople when I’ve been in-store.

    As for me, when I build my own PC in the (whenever, hell if I know) future, I’ll likely build my own. Unless, of course, the main PC goes belly up and I have to get something fast.

  3. Ugh, some of the latest rounds of Windows updates have been truly awful. Sorry to hear that it ate your poor old machine.

    As for build vs. buy, for decades I was all about building everything myself and figured anything bought off-the-shelf was crap. I still feel like most of the true off-the-shelf is pretty junky, but I no longer have the patience to scour lists of components and shop around, not to mention the potential risks of me screwing something up when putting it all together. When my previous PC finally died, this time I just went up to Microcenter where it took less than half an hour talking with one of their custom PC salespeople to get an really nice set of components picked out and they assembled everything for me less than 48 hours later. The price was not really all that much more than I think I would have paid if I had done it all myself, and the professional cable management job they did inside the case is easily worth every extra penny. 🙂

    If you have a Microcenter, Fry’s, or something like that nearby I definitely recommend just dropping in to talk to them.

  4. I was able to outsource the PC buying to thehusband. We decided to go prebuilt though for the simple reason that it is a pandemic and if the shit hits the fan, we don’t want to be GOING to Fry’s to figure out what’s wrong. We want to be able to box up the effing thing and send it back. Pandemic, ugh.

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