My parents wanted me to look around for a decent £200-ish computer. So I had a look. But the ones I saw weren't all that good. I then thought that I could build a computer! Seems easy enough? I found out what was compatible and bought

• Intel Pentium Dual Core 1.8 GHz
• 80 GB SATA HDD
• 52x CD drive
• ASRock motherboard
• 1 GB RAM
• Cheap case w/ PSU (remind me never to buy one of these again! You could chop your fingers off with one of those..)
• NVIDIA graphics card (256 MB)

For around £170. So as you can see, it's not very powerful, but powerful enough for what it's going to be used for. This was from aria.co.uk.

So I got around to building it. The first thing I opened was the motherboard. It looked quite nice. I looked in the manual and it said to put in the CPU first. Ok. So I opened up the processor and was amazed at how small it was. The last CPU I saw was an AMD Duron...and they're not small. So I followed the instructions in the CPU's manual and I thought I had put it in right. Next I screwed in the motherboard. Easy. I plugged everything in, and thought, that was easy! But I press the power button and...nothing. I had no idea why it didn't work. So I got some people I know that build computers for their job to help me The problem was that the power button's wire was plugged in the wrong part. It was all in the manual...DUH! I really should read those things properly.

So now the computer was built, I had to install an OS on it. Firstly, I tried Ubuntu. The wireless card (a horrible broadcom based one which worked..decently before) refused to work.

But in the middle of all this, another problem cropped up. The RAM was faulty! Remind me never to buy some cheap "value" RAM again. I sent for a replacement and they gave me a nicer one than before

After this, I tried to install XP on it. After installing all the drivers, still no internet! So I looked around for one, and was recommended to use one from Amazon. I put it in and XP could connect but, was intermittent. I was very confused. I then tried to put it into the other PCI slot. And it worked..but by then XP was off and Ubuntu was back. I could connect once to the internet but then after a reboot everything I tried did nothing. I thought I should try a different distro. I tried Linux Mint and it works great! I'm using it right now in fact The only bad thing about it is that it's 32 bit. I prefer 64 bit...because I like being on the bleeding edge. That means technology too (but only if I can afford it :P). Thank you to the Linux Mint devs