After my last machine decided to stop functioning properly, somebody recommended that I build my own PC because it is cheaper than buying a prefab, and apparently the process is pretty easy, even easier than building a LEGO set! This is the biggest mistake that I made all season. He convinced me that I could handle it and I failed to handle it.
First of all, I don’t understand why anyone thinks that offering a how-to guide like this one on assembling a computer is a good idea. That is about as reasonable as giving someone a guide on how to fix an engine, as if a Yugo’s engine is identical to a sports car’s (yeah, right). Unless the reader or listener happens to have all of the exact same parts as the author, the guide is next to useless. There is no point.
Computers vary massively in layout and accessories. I hate to state the obvious, but you can’t just toss any fucking how-to guide at a beginner and expect them to understand and follow it perfectly. These guides, much like the official manuals, are dense and loaded with jargon, showing us crap that we don’t have and crap that isn’t where we expect to find it.
Here’s a good example: somebody told me that I needed a large screw to secure a stick. At first I thought that I had to order another part since I lacked that, but it turned out that the screw that I had was just obnoxiously tiny. Almost microscopic. Even my long-distance assistant said that it ‘looked wrong’ when he saw it, but it did the trick.
Likewise, it is ridiculously easy to plug something the wrong way, which can potentially fry your machine. My computer also came with a load of crap that I apparently didn’t need, which is fine for compatibility but ends up making the process more confusing and intimidating.
This hardware is both delicate and expensive to replace, too, which means that if you fuck up, it’s a big deal (unless you’re rich). It was only after I finally took my machine to a technician that I learned that I broke two parts beyond repair, meaning that now I have to spend about $300 on repair and extra parts for a plan that originally cost me $600. I could have purchased a good prefab with all that fucking money!
Look, just don’t tell anybody that assembling a computer is easy, and especially don’t tell beginners to try it without constant, immediate-distance supervision. (Long-distance supervision is still too risky.) The process is so delicate and there are so many ways to make serious mistakes that it isn’t worth it, and anybody who finds a guide or manual unhelpful is going to be very tempted to improvise, which is dangerous. I actually made my fingers bleed trying to assemble a computer (no joke), and I wasted hundreds of dollars that I could have spent on a cheap, prefabricated gaming computer instead. I feel very frustrated tonight, and I am stuck on my smartphone for another week or two.
I’m an IT technician with many years of experience, and even doing numerous hours of research in guides, forums, videos, etc., I made costly mistakes during my first computer build. I overspent on parts I realized I didn’t need. I cracked parts that cost several hundred dollars. I had to argue to get refunds/replacements for parts that I broke because of shitty instructions that completely skipped certain steps. I overlooked the expensive maintenance costs that come with an expensive rig. Building the machine gave me cuts and bruises. In retrospect, now I wish I just built a server tower with a rackmount for my desktop so I could have expanded later without buying more space-consuming cases. And to expect a non-tech inexperienced person to just DIY their own build when cost is the primary reason? Hell no.
Anymore, once cheap hobbies have now been hyperexploited by corporations and scalpers, especially in computer building. Due to economies of scale, prefabs tend to be cheaper than building a computer yourself, and it saves you headache and gives you the chance to make baby steps when opening the case the first time. I recommend going for a computer that is inexpensive. I recommend starting with a refurbished tower and getting a few missing parts, or paying for a technician or computer store to build a computer for you, or spending the extra hundred dollars on a prefab to give you the chance to get comfortable with maintenance, upgrades, and repairs. Buy cheap computers and parts on eBay (not for your main workstation), and learn to put them together. Building computers takes a lot of practice to gain the experience needed to be comfortable with building them and avoiding mistakes, essentially the technical work equivalent of praxis. And yes, cuts and bruises are to be expected, building computers can be a pain in the ass.
I am going to go on a bit of a tangent.
DIY culture is incredibly individualist. I see many techbros tell people that the solution to their technical/financial/civil rights struggles is to self-host your own infrastructure, build your own computer, just go install Linux, create a fork of a large project, and here’s my GNU coreutils killer written in Rust…and the project is archived a few months later. Developing technical skills and becoming technologically sovereign is a collective effort. These so-called individualist solutions neglect the maintenance and support required by multiple people. Learning computers should involve in-person guidance, especially with non-tech people. There’s so much technical knowledge that experienced tech people not involved in supporting regular people overlook as being naturally intuitive, which is not the case. Doing technical work is not for the faint of heart, and to say everyone should learn to code and to achieve technical freedom is to build your own machine and install Linux completely neglects the need for people to realize that change won’t come the mosquito bites which drain a little blood from the big tech elephants, but to realize systemic change is needed, and we can’t be free until we all work towards our collective freedom and overthrow this capitalist system. People need to be realistic and wary of all the things that go wrong when they suggest people to DIY. Any DIY project requires education and often leads to a massive time and money sink, and DIYing out of capitalist crises as an individual effort is not sustainable.