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Thinking of joining the ranks of hands-on PC users who build their own systems? To salute your courage, we tried to locate the best tutorials out there. We began with the following search term, "build your own pc," and luck was with us. A site called Build Your Own PC offers step-by-step instructions for selecting the best possible hardware components for your budget (we're talking motherboards, drives, and cards here), putting it all together, and choosing an operating system that's right for you. There are also pointers to many other good resources for hardware geeks, er... connoisseurs. Tom's Hardware Guide is
one such resource. Once you've used the Mainboard and CPU Guides, come back for card and component reviews and recommendations, news, and more. Another helpful site is Jef Poskanzer's Build a PC, which offers colorful, articulate advice: Start by figuring out what CPU, chipset, and motherboard you want. These are respectively the brains, soul, and heart of your machine. A search on "build computer" produced different results, many irrelevant to your question, but it did lead us to Eric Raymond's 1996 classic, "Building the Perfect Box: How to Design Your Linux Workstation." The search results also gave us the idea of browsing the top-level Yahoo! Computer Hardware category for more information. This led us to Ars Technica's Complete System Building Guide, with an illustrated anatomy of the PC under construction and detailed photos and forums. PC Mechanic also offers rich tutorials on assembling a home PC or web server. Although presentation styles and personal preferences vary from site to site, nearly all the tutorials agree that building your own
computer guarantees that you'll save money (though not necessarily time!), get what you pay for as well as what you choose, and end up with a machine that you can understand, and therefore, upgrade effectively. Just remember to keep yourself grounded and find a good forum or list where you can ask questions and get intelligent answers.
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