So I put an end to the little adventure of trying to build my own PC. I don't think you're going to really save much (if any) money. You can boost your geek cred, but pre-built computers with great specs are cheap these days, and my experience was pretty much a nightmare.
A friend who said he would help me put it together was unable to get it to boot into BIOS, so we started swapping individual components (e.g. PSU, ram, video card, etc.) to try to isolate the problem. After swapping in my friend's PSU, the motherboard started to smoke. Nice, huh?
Having had enough, I called NewEgg customer service and told them the whole sordid story. They let me return all the parts and they paid for the shipping, as long as I ordered a pre-built system from them, which I did. Hopefully they'll issue a full refund on the returned parts upon receiving them and my new machine will work when I plug it in.
Anyway, I learned a valuable lesson. To whit...I am not a hardware dude. One of the advantages of human culture is the whole division of labor thing, and I'll let someone in a Taiwanese sweat shop who does it for 16 hours a day put my PC together for me, while I work on the software side of things.
Saturday, June 13, 2009
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1 comment:
Sounds like the lesson will be relatively inexpensive. Except for your time and frustration. Don't be surprised if you get hit with some restocking charge or something else for parts that are "damaged".
It still amazes me that we can buy a fully loaded PC for $700. Yeah sweatshops!
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