>>For sure my next purchase will not be a custom built PC. I prefer to spend my time elsewhere than to try to make my system work. I will surely buy a PC from Dell.
>
>I guess it's a pride thing, like motorheads rebuilding cars.

I've been spoiled by working in three software companies which had their own HW engineers, so I've spent most of the time between '92 and '02 knowing a beatified nothing about what's new there. Then I started telecommuting, but was lucky to have a son-in-law who knows those things, so whenever a new box needs to be put together, he writes the shopping list according to our loose specs.

This time he had only about half an hour, so he basically confirmed what I already picked, except that he found better replacements for two items. And I'm still proud (yep, just like the bikers, or like one of our daughters who can replace struts,starter, battery and nearly half of the engine on her hatchback) to be able to plug everything in and have it work. This last endeavor was for the youngest daughter's new box (the old one burned two video cards), where the power unit was almost three kilos (at least felt like), all the cables are shielded, and had a total of five fans - a true fan club. And, um, it flies. The total (new housing with its own 12" fan, 480W power, Athlon 2.4GHz 2x64, 2G, PCI-e video card (don't know which :) and an ASUS M2N motherboard) was $500 - monitors, disks, keyboard etc were OOP, i.e. inherited. Just like I inherited 1G from the old box ;).