My computer is becoming a dinosaur. Ok, not quite, but I am getting really interested in a new machine. I’ve had this one for more than 5 years now, though a few parts have been upgraded since it was purchased.

Allow me to nerd out for a while…

I’m very tempted to build my own, despite my husband pointing out that it will almost certainly cost more money than buying a pre-built system. Five years ago, I wouldn’t have thought about it at all, I’d have just started looking at the Best Buy ads, or asked my Dad what he suggested and eventually bought a retail rig. But now it just sounds so much more fun to pick out all the parts and make it work all on my own!

As Jon reminded me, the most prohibitive part of building my own machine will likely be buying an OS. When he built his desktop a couple years ago we ran in to that problem. It wasn’t as simple as hooking up his old hard drive that had an HP install of XP on it, nope. We ended up running to the store right before the place closed to spend another $200 on Vista because the HP install was incompatible with his new motherboard. It sucked. He was so excited about his first build, we thought going in that he’d just be voiding the HP warranty, we overlooked the fact that he wouldn’t be able to use it at all. It seems obvious now… the Windows license wasn’t truly his, it was an OEM install and was locked to the original machine.

I can get student pricing on an upgrade of Windows 7 for just $30, but an upgrade doesn’t work on a newly built machine. You need to have a previous version of Windows installed. *sigh* I guess for now I’ll just be dreaming of processors, heatsinks, and graphics cards, and hoping that I can figure out some way to justify building, even if it does cost more. (I already have an ATX form factor chassis and a relatively decent Mushkin power supply! It might be able to keep up with a new build, right?)