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Zero Hour approaches for my £250 build

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Myself and several of my colleagues are currently taking part in a unique challenge – buying or building a PC for £250 and discovering whether the high street, the internet or building the machine yourself yields the best results.

I’d had thoughts of building a media centre machine, but that plan is, at this point, dead in the water. To get that build into budget I found myself cutting too many corners: reducing the size of the hard disk, settling for an even worse chassis and not being able to include wireless internet, for instance, felt like removing too many crucial features to make it worthwhile.

So, that means my machine will be a good old-fashioned desktop PC, albeit one without a monitor or speakers. My final shopping list has been tweaked, pennies have been shaved off prices, and I’ve spent most of the week calculating delivery charges to work out if I save money by ordering from one site or if I’d be ruined by City Link.

My list of specifications is now complete, though, so you have until early afternoon to try and dissuade me from making a terrible mistake:

  • Intel Pentium Dual Core E2200 – £57.60
  • ABIT I-45V motherboard – £25.53
  • Asus Radeon HD 4670 graphics card – £63.36
  • 2GB 667MHz DDR2 RAM – £15.99
  • 250GB Hitachi Deskstar SATA II 7,200rpm 8MB cache – £33.08
  • Samsung DVD+/-RW – £15.25
  • Eye T Warrior Silver Gaming Case – £18.39
  • Extra Value Multimedia keyboard – £3.42
  • Extra Value optical mouse – £2.91

This leaves me with £3.75 spare cash out of my original £250 budget and, if I were being sensible, I’d save this money to help me out should anything go wrong with my machine. I’m not particularly sensible, though, and it seems that less than four quid won’t get me very far if I melt my CPU – so I’ve earmarked that money on anything I can buy that will keep the finished machine cool, quiet and tidy – so it might mean a single case fan or a pack of cable ties.

I’m now left with nothing more than an empty wallet and a head full of anticipation. My choices of delivery – super saver on every site I’ve used, basically – means that I’m not entirely sure when my components will arrive and in what order, so my excitement at getting to build this machine will have to wait until I get a fateful call from the post room.

Nevertheless, I’ll still be keeping busy. There’s plenty of Ubuntu-related research to carry out and a huge number of useful Open Source programs to download if I want to make my PC the best £250 Open Source machine it can be.

And, of course, it needs a name. I haven’t been able to come up with anything decent so, again, it’s over to you – if you think you have a certain phrase that captures the power, versatility and (probable) incompetence of my machine then please let me know – I’ll be forever grateful.


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