KnifeMissile

I totally agree that the best money saving technique in buying a computer is figuring out how you will honestly use it. The technique of buying the best computer within a budget is only for geeks whose livelihood depends on one.

As for putting a computer together yourself, this can be a wonderful and rewarding experience but you must seriously consider if this is really for you. I recently, for the first time, put together a computer from scratch and, while it was rather simple (for me), it was also far more time consuming and frustrating than I had anticipated. You must follow the instructions carefully and be prepared to solve problems because they will encounter some! Two things that are not in any of the instructions are what drivers you need for what devices and how to configure two devices sharing the same bus. If you have no clue what I'm talking about then you should consider getting someone else to build your computer (from scratch for some OEM, like Dell).

So, in short, you can easily build your own computer as long as you're good at following instructions, including inferring what the instructions mean (because the English language is only so precise), and if you are good at problem solving (because something will go awry). If you're interested, dalaamprince (who is the thread starter) I can make a thread about my personal adventure in building a computer. It is long and complicated, with a lot of ins and outs and what-have-you, much like The Big Lebowski, and you might learn a lot from my experience, like whether you want to go through the same thing...