About Technology

Well, I’m here to convince you otherwise, and to show you the 8 easy steps to building your build your own computer. Fine, it’s not as simple as it sounds. But the truth is, it’s not much harder.

What’s more, there’s a lot of help around. Many great tutorials, a bunch of forums filled with people online 24/7 (that’s free help – no paying an IT $100+ an hour), and computer parts that are constantly falling down in price. So here are the eight steps…

1) First you have to set yourself a budget. Do you have $500 or $3,000?

2) You need to identify what specific components help you to do your computer tasks the best. Are you doing gaming, graphics editing, movie watching? How large is your screen?

3) Pick a general set of parts that you want. For example, if you want a heavy duty graphics card to do gaming and video editing on, you can pick whether you want a low end one, or a high end card, brand name or generic, etc.

4) Make sure that all parts are compatible with each other. You don’t want to buy your parts, and then realize “shoot, the motherboard fits only 939 pin CPU’s (that’s AMD processors), and I got myself a Core 2 Duo. If you are a little new at the game, I wouldn’t stress about it though. There are plenty of computer building forums around. You can just search for “computer forums” on your favorite search engine. You can also go to Anandtech’s computer forum and get help if you get confused. I promise though, it’s not that hard! I know, I wasn’t a “tech geek” when I started either.

5) Start Price Shopping. Look around on different sites. My favorite ones are newegg and tigerdirect. However, I would also search Google product search, as there are some small sellers that sometimes beat even tigerdirect and newegg!

6) Order your parts (that should be pretty simple)

7) Learn How to build your own computer. Building your own computer is not as hard as you think it is. You can either read the manuals from the manufacturers. However, for the uninitiated, that can be a little overwhelming. The guys down at Corsair put together a great computer building manual, or if you are more video oriented you can search on youtube for computer building videos.

8) Finally, the last and most important step – build your computer! What is better than the feeling every time you sit down in front of the computer that you built yourself. How empowering is it??! – Not to mention time saving.

You’re done. You’ve learned the 8 steps to build your own computer. Now it’s time you actually do it for yourself.