John Rumm wrote:
On 09/07/2012 17:10, Rick Hughes wrote:

Been a number of years since I have built a PC from scratch .. had to
feed in loads of FD's to load Dos and W 3.1 :-)

I need a new PC at home, I have my spec sorted for a W7 64bit (apart
from case), and just wondering whether it's worth getting all the parts
and assembling yourself.
Or buying form one place and get them to assemble ... (Overclockers
assemble for £70 for example)

If they assemble .. at least you can be sure it all works together ...
and guarantee result, views ?

The advantage of building your own is you get to control the quality of
the small details... so things like selecting particularly quiet
components, mounting chassis fans on rubber mounts, carefully cable
tying stuff neatly, sticking noise dampening pads on the inside of the
metalwork etc.

The advantage of pre-built is you get someone else to sit through the
tedium of OS installs!


not in my case. What I get is the guarantee that at least the assorted
collection of hardware is plugged together correctly, and works well
enough to boot a windows loader.

After that I spend ten minutes installing a linux bootstrap and let it
chug through the installation whilst I have a coffee.

And if the hardware doesn't work IN ANY WAY the lot goes back to The Man
who replaces the defective bit. No buck passing 'the problem is in the
bit you bought from someone else, sir.



If you think getting it pre-assembled, any companies particularly good
price wise ?
Overclockers, SCAN, Power PC ?

Not used any of them, so can't comment.

However one thing to keep in mind, is that even with a whole unit
warranty, its not always cost effective to use it. I had someone bring
me about a prebuilt system which had suffered a PSU failure. The company
that supplied it were happy to fix it under warranty, but it had to be
sent back at the customers expense, and also they claimed it would be
restored to default configuration - hence the would need to do a full
backup first and then restore it when the machine came back.


My builder just takes it all back no problem and makes it all work.

So their choice was jump through the backup and restore hoops, pay for
sending it away, lose it for a few days into the bargain, and then doing
a full restore on it after it comes back, or pay for me to swap the PSU
for them on the spot! They decided the latter carried less risk and
hassle (although I did persuade them to do the backup anyway!)

Spec proposed:

ASUS P87ZZ-V LE

Not had many problems with ASUS boards in general...

[snip spec]

Looks fine, although fairly "normal" - so you would not have difficulty
finding a supplier to flog you that spec.



--
To people who know nothing, anything is possible.
To people who know too much, it is a sad fact
that they know how little is really possible -
and how hard it is to achieve it.