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I enjoy building my own PC and I feel that it is rather enjoyable to pick the parts myself to build my own PC. For those of you who are wavering and sitting on the fence, here are some reasons, in fact 7 of them, that supports the building of your own PC.

Customized to Your Needs

Your PC can be customized to your own needs. For example, you might need a DVD writer but not need a high-end graphic card as you will never use its 3D features to play games. You can choose the parts that you’ll need. One 500GB hard disk drive? Or two 250GB hard drives? It’s all up to you. You can even decide to have 5 hard drives and raid them together in a RAID5 configuration. No problem. Try asking for that from a Dell salesperson.

Customized to Your Budget

So you only have $800 to spend? Sure, make a budget computer. Reuse your monitor, keyboard and mouse, maybe even your hard drives, why not? Sure some new Dell configurations don’t come with the monitor or keyboard and mice, but you can’t tell them to remove their DVD writer and refund you the price as you can reuse your perfectly working DVD writer from your old computer. If you build your own PC, it’s all configurable and you can shop around to find the best prices for the individual parts.

Cheaper Cost

You don’t have to spend money on things that you don’t need. If you have Windows XP already, why buy a new computer that comes preloaded with Windows XP? Use the same CD to install Windows on your new PC, or better yet, use the same hard drive and not have to reinstall. Note that you might have to do some stuff to make it work on your new hardware as Windows tends to think that you’re a pirate if you change your motherboard or too many hardware devices.

Learn More About the Parts of a PC

When you build your own PC, you obviously have to do a lot more research than just buying one off the shelf. However, the time that you spend on your research will benefit you in two ways. Firstly, it will teach you what parts are used for what purposes and how you can customize them to meet your needs. Secondly, the knowledge gained from this will allow you to better judge the power of PCs being sold as a whole and not be cheated/deceived/lied to/coerced/”encouraged” by the salespeople at roadshows to buy their uber-powered computer or some crap.

Upgrading

Can’t play the latest games? With the knowledge of the various parts of your PC, you can check out the minimum and recommended specifications of the game and decide on what you can do to make it run on your computer. Sometimes it’s just a matter of your graphic card not being up-to-date enough. No point getting a whole system which costs SGD$1200 to $2000 when you can upgrade your graphic card for $100 to $900 right?

Choose Your Own OS

For the more adventurous, or for those who know what they are doing, why pay for Windows Vista, or even XP? Install your favourite distribution of Linux for free. For those who don’t know, Linux is another operating system that you can install on your computer. Installing of operating systems are not simple but with the recent user-friendly graphical installations from popular distributions of Linux such as Ubuntu, Fedora or Mandriva, it is not very difficult too. Do note that you will not be able to run your favourite Windows applications on Linux without doing anything (read Wine) and even then not all applications will work. However, to be fair there are tons of software on Linux that do the exact same thing as the applications on Windows, so it is just a choice of converting. I will try to get some Linux tutorials up sometime in the future for those who are interested to pick up more about the OS.

No Crapware

You don’t have to put up with tons of demo applications installed in your computer the moment you boot it up for the first time. No more pre-installed applications that you don’t want and you don’t need. Only install and see the programs that you need. This is what I mean by no crapware.

That’s about it. Do comment if you can think of any other reasons. I will reply if I have the chance. Do Digg my article if you like it! =)

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