Regarding building a PC: I like to buy the critical parts from a trusted vendor (motherboard, hard.drive), the rest of the parts I get at shows and stuff. I've had power supplies go bad so it's not a bad idea to spend extra to buy high quality from a trusted vendor there too. (actually, I've had every other thing go bad too at one time or another. When you build your own machine you don't hesitate to upgrade it or fix it yourself which is the best part. You won't save much by building but you will save bundles of money and time by fixing it yourself at a later time because you'll know what went into it.
Also, cheap cases can be pretty annoying sometimes, no matter how cool they look. spending extra on a case can save you headaches and also bloody hands from sharp edges. Read the motherboard documentation thoroughly. A missed jumper can cause hours of annoyance or even a burned out motherboard. DO NOT SKIMP ON THE HARD DRIVE. That's the most important part of your computer. A motherboard can be replaced. Your data cannot. Not to mention the many hours of os install time, application install time and configuration. Any drive will work for a while. The best drives will still be working 5-10 years down the road. That's what you want. Partition magic is the tool of choice for partitioning that new hard drive. I've done it all ways and that's the best. If the drive gets fussy after a few bad fdisk runs use Linux fdisk. It's more powerful and has gotten me out of jams that partition magic couldn't solve. Try building the machine at a meeting or a workshop so you have help around you when you run into trouble, not to mention tools you may not have like long tweezers, curved needle nose pliers, flashlights, extra jumpers, extra cables and extra parts to swap for debugging. I always put handles on the top of my cases because I move them around a lot. It's amazing how convient that is. If you do, put the handle on before you screw in the motherboard and start building so you don't get drill filings into the circuitry. Use parts that all came onto the market around the same time (same year) for minimal hardware headaches. Incompatibilities arrize when you use parts from differnt eras or operating systems from different years then the parts (interesting). Don't worry about avoiding driver issues. Just consider it part of the fun. There's always driver issues. It's all part of the game. Have a second computer available to go to the internet to grab updated drivers. So that's my 2 cents. Have Fun! Wayne --- Jeffrey Yep <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Looking at building my own PC and I was hoping > someone had already gone > through this process. Any resources, websites etc. > in particular to > recommend for first, researching latest PC > components, and secondly, > linux-friendly hardware? > > Hopefully I can have the best of both worlds, the > latest and greatest and > at the same time, no Linux driver issues. :-) Here > starts another journey, > so lets hear it. > > Thanks, > Jeff > __________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! Calendar - Free online calendar with sync to Outlook(TM). http://calendar.yahoo.com
