I will no longer buy branded equipment

I’ve lost count of how many computers I’ve built since I realized how much I prefer to have my PCs.

I got my first computer in the early 90s, although it was not my first computer. My first contact with personal computers came through a Spectrum with 48 KB of RAM (the first model with plastic rather than rubber keys), which my parents gave me for my birthday in 1985. What wonderful memories I have a small and modest computer. And the next one is Atari ST 520 FM.

Then the PC came. I bought it from a small computer store in the center of Madrid. It was one of those clone computers that proliferated in the 90s, and I bought it assembled. It had a 66 MHz 80486 DX2 processor from Intel and 4 MB of RAM. At the time, setting up and building a PC from scratch was beyond my capabilities, but soon after purchasing it, I decided to purchase a Sound Blaster 16 sound card from Creative.

Despite my inexperience, it didn’t seem difficult to install it on my computer, so I plucked up my courage and opened it. All was good. However, what really matters to me is that the sound card was installed incorrectly; Along the way, I discovered that PC architecture It wasn’t as difficult as I imagined., so I immediately decided to take it one step further and expanded my main memory. There was no turning back.

Designing and building your own PC has (for me) many benefits.

This was the first and last computer I bought assembled. After two years, I had learned enough to dare to configure and build my next computer myself, so I started there, and my first discovery was that it was not bulky at all. Vice versa. I really enjoyed picking out each part, assembling it, and installing the operating system and all the software from scratch. And along the way I learned a lot. Although almost three decades have passed since then, the situation has not changed. I still really enjoy this whole process.

Honestly, I’ve lost count of how many rigs I’ve built since then. Many of them were for me, but I collected some for family and friends, and I worked for several months collecting them at a small computer store to pay for my studies. Outside how pleasant I find this experience

I believe that building your own custom computer has a number of advantages over buying a pre-built computer, especially if it’s a brand name one, from selecting components to fine tuning every detail of the BIOS and operating system.

The most obvious is that it offers you the option to select each item. Every component. I think it’s worth doing some research to find the brand and model that best suits the performance we’re looking to achieve and the budget we have. Moreover, knowing everything that is happening allows us to react quickly if a problem arises. When you configure and tune your own computer, you can determine the source of the problem relatively easily, and this is the first necessary step to successfully fix it.

On the other hand, as you can see, this option gives us the opportunity to very accurately adapt its equipment to our needs. And also in our budget. In fact, if we’re careful, we can also save some money if we compare its cost to the price of a PC built in a similar configuration. To me, these benefits matter.

Of course, very high-quality equipment is assembled here, allowing you to save time and effort that you need to invest in setting up a PC from scratch. For many people this is the way to go and it is absolutely the right and respectable option. But it’s not mine. I will continue to build my own computer according to my needs and budget, as I have done since the mid-90s.

Image | Robert Nixon

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*A previous version of this article was published in February 2023.