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Home PC – Why?

This year I’m building my PC for our house, it is something that I’ve been wanting to do for a few years. I kept meaning to do it, then I read this post on Coding Horror, and the desire to take this on came back. I want to address on this post why I’m doing this.

Why?

  1. Our current home pc is a laptop I purchased for my MBA 5 years ago. It is a good machine, Intel Core 2 Duo Chip, 6GB RAM, 512 GB HHD. It has served us well, as I mentioned on my Dropbox post this machine contains an offline copy of everything that is stored in my Dropbox account. It also syncs any pictures we take on our camera, and connects to a backup Drive. This machine is beginning to slow down, the HHD is starting to show wear.
  2. I have moved many of our assets away from a PC, I still want a central hub. If the internet went dark, I can be assured that all my photos, all my files, all records are there, close to me.
  3. All other devices still can’t do everything a PC can. I’m amazed how easy it is to create a movie on iMovie on my phone. I can edit a photo to my heart’s content on any devise, but try to format a document with text, images, and column that is more than 1,000 words. Printing is still hard (margins, gutter, flow) on mobile devices. You need a PC to properly format, print, and basically have an always on, copper cable, connection to the internet.
  4. I want to build the machine, I really want to tackle this project.

What will be the end result?

So far these are the specs for the PC:

Looking for a system configuration like this one is well over $1,500 I’m hoping to build it for less than $500. I will start buying the parts next month and should start building and testing in 6 weeks. I will update you on the progress!