The pros and cons of building your own PC

I'm all for building your own PC, but it doesn't always go smoothly. And believe it or not, Fry's doesn't have everything you need all the time.

Adrian Kingsley-Hughes of ZDnet's Gear for Geeks blog relates his own experience:

The first irritant is the volume of trash that building a PC generates. In fact, the last two PCs I built created such a volume of waste that I was really appalled. From what I can tell, building a PC with parts sourced online seems to mean that you end up with enough cardboard and styrofoam to fill the box that the case came in. It’s not too bad because 99% of the trash can be recycled (so the process is pretty guilt-free) but you do need the space in order to be able to store the parts and work, and I’m certain that over the years that minimum working space that you need has increased.

The second thing that gets me emotional is the quality of SATA cables and connectors. Why is it that when you buy a quality board like an ASUS or Gigabyte you end up with poor quality cabling that it inflexible and has massive end connectors that make it difficult to route the cables in a tidy fashion? Why not just not bother to supply cables? Or, better still, supply decent quality cables with a decently-priced board? I’m buried here in SATA cables. I have dozens laying about the place. I don’t throw them away because they “could come in handy one day” but they never do. To top that off, why do the plastic SATA connectors on a motherboard need to be so brittle and flimsy? Do they really need to break that easily? Might it be possible to design a connector that can actually hold the cable in place?

Despite the problems, just the fact that you can build your own PC is a beautiful, beautiful thing.

At the moment, my favorite vendors for new parts if you're building a traditional PC (with ATX or microATX motherboards) are Tiger Direct, NewEgg and EWorldSale. My favorite place for used parts is Pacific Geek.

If you want to go small, for mini-ITX components I like Cappuccino PC, iDotPC, Logic Supply and the Damn Small Linux Store.