10 mistakes you should not make when building a new PC for the first time

A personal computer box with one side open, exposing the motherboard with two pairs of purple coloured cooling tubes, and three spinning fans at the bottom of the case.

Buying a ready-made PC is full of compromises. I’ve always built my own PC’s ever since I moved from an Amiga to using DR-DOS. It’s one way of ensuring you get all the components you really want, and you can easily swap out upgraded parts as well.

In the later days, if you did not want to pay for Windows, you had to build your own PC with hard drives you sourced.

The linked post has some practical tips to consider. The power supply section is especially important. A quality PSU will not only give you many years of use, but can help prevent freezes etc. Here in South Africa, we have constant load shedding, and what I’ve noticed is my PC has no issue with the 20ms switch-over to back up power, whilst my wife’s PC shuts off. The difference is her PC sits with my older cheap PSU in it still. The PSU is actually the last line of defence between any grid power issues and your expensive motherboard, CPU, RAM and storage. Buy well once and get many years of trouble-free use out of it.

See https://www.xda-developers.com/things-you-should-not-do-while-building-a-new-pc-for-the-first-time