I am a computer geek.
I have been tinkering with computers for as long as I can remember, and started building systems completely from scratch about 4 or 5 years ago.
My PC was a hand-crafted labor of love, constantly upgrading bits and pieces every few years to keep it bleeding edge and performing well. This probably cost me $6000 total over the past 4 years (from initial build to today).

This past weekend, my power supply blew, taking the motherboard, RAM and CPU with it, as well as one of the CD drives, and I think my network card. My 4-year, $6000 masterpiece blew up, it was the end of my greatest single investment. Here's how the whole ordeal went:

Sunday (1/4/04) -
I'm working on moving some stuff out of my apartment back home as I graduated and wanted out of my lease. I come back into my room for a few more boxes and notice that the monitor is blank. I move the mouse and nothing happens. I figure it was a power glitch (I have a flaky power strip). I turn the machine back on and spend about 20min doing e-mail, chat and sorting a few files out. All of a sudden the computer cuts out like it lost power. I check all the cables, all the connections and turn it back on. This time it stays on for about 10min. After it cuts out this time I decide to just pack everything up and deal with it when I've moved home.

Monday (1/5/04) -
Noon
I set my machine up again, get everything plugged in and turn the machine on. It doesn't even make it to starting windows before it cuts out now. So I take the side of the case off to see what's going on, thinking there may be something wrong with the CPU fan causing it to overheat, or maybe there was an obvious short somewhere. I turn the machine on, with my hand on the heatsink to check for heat, looking at the fans and wires, and I'm not seeing anything. About 20 seconds into startup, everything just sort of spins down to a halt. This time it takes a few min before the machine will respond to me pressing the on switch. When it finally does, it spins up and spins down again even quicker. After briefly consulting with a few friends, it is confirmed that the PSU died, so I go out to bestbuy to get a new one.

2:00pm
I return from bestbuy, 400W Antec PSU in-hand, and I swap the old one for the new one. Get everything plugged back in, throw the power switch, and hit the on button. Everything spins up wonderfully, power looks good to all components, however the video card wasn't giving off a signal, and the CD drive lights wouldn't turn off like they normally do after the brief power-up diagnostic. There were also no error beeps of any kind, and no hard drive activity at all. I think it is possible that maybe my video card went with the PSU. So I test the card on a spare board and CPU I have sitting around, and it works fine on that board. I also test my hard drives out at work and they're alright too... but the RAM, CPU, network card and DVD drive didn't fare so well. It is determined that I'm fucked and need to look to replace a lot of components.

5:00pm
After stepping away from the wreckage for a bit to clear my head, I took another look to see if I had missed something and came up with nothing. I absolutely needed to make some purchases to get myself a working computer again. I start to surf pricewatch.com, as well as computer manufacturers such as Dell, Alienware (I"m a gamer), Falcon Northwest and a few others.

...

I was frustrated, I was upset (having no computer does that to a computer geek), but most of all I was angry at myself. The power supply was a year and a half old, well beyond the warranty of the individual part. In fact, every time a part has died on me (one motherboard, one hard drive, one video card), they've all called it quits just beyond the part warranty period of 90 days/1 year. There was nothing I could do to appeal for support, I had to fix and replace everything myself, at intervals that were shorter than was reasonable. I had wasted hundreds of hours fiddling, tweaking and testing hardware and software on my machine in the attempt to get it as fast as possible, but stable as well. Also, I spend all day every day troubleshooting problems here at work, as well as for friends and family on my free-time. Why should I be wasting my leisure time doing what I do for work?!

It was with that in mind I gave up hunting parts on Pricewatch.com and went back to looking just at manufacturers of complete systems. I wanted something with a warranty longer than a year, and I wanted high performance. Alienware machines are known for being great gaming PCs, but their prices were a bit too high for what I was looking at. Same for Falcon Northwest. Dell recently came out with a new Dimension model (the Dimension XPS), an attempt to enter the gaming system market. What they had to offer looked very solid, and after cutting out some unneeded features (monitor since I already have one, RAID, speaker set) I came up with a very attractive price ($2,200 after rebates and the Penn State discount). So I counted my pennies and clicked on the order button. That was Monday night, as of today the system is built, and Dell should ship it to me tomorrow, delivery should be Wednesday.

I am honestly tired of the back-and-forth that is entailed in building and managing customized systems. My secondary boxes will always be home-spun as it's more fun that way, but I think my primary systems from now on will be done by a manufacturer jsut because it saves me tons of time and frustration, and if something goes seriously wrong, I can have SOMEONE ELSE fix it.

Here is an excellent blog post about the frustrations of building your computer from scratch, or just doing hardware upgrades in general.
http://jeremy.zawodny.com/blog/archives/000963.html

After countless upgrades to my custom built rig, I can completely understand and sympathize with this man. The number of times I've purchased one part to upgrade and found I needed two or three other to get the first to work is more than I'd like to count.