The first computer I built myself was a 386 SX/33 with 4 megs of RAM and VGA (I think). I couldn't afford a hard drive at first because I was a kid, so all i had was a 3.5 inch floppy drive. Had to buy a hard drive later, and if I had to guess, it was an 80 megabyte one. In the mean time, I could use a RAM drive.
Computer Shopper was such an amazing magazine to go through, and I would always try and find the best deal from the systems advertised, not that I had any real money. Usually it was from the ads in the back, not the big pretty Gateway ads in the front.
> Computer Shopper was such an amazing magazine to go through
I really miss that type of advertising. I don't want advertising intruding on unrelated activities, ruining tools and destroying my neighbourhood with billboards.
But there are times I want to be sold to. I want 100 firms to show off what they have and extol their virtues in an easy to browse format.
In general, you can still save a lot of money, and have a higher quality end result by building your own desktop system, unless you want a really low-end machine. Well, this is not quite true these days, but if the blockchain madness abates, then GPU prices will fall back into reasonable levels.
I have not found that to be true at all. It's true if you go with a high-end custom pc builder, but you can often get a very respectable desktop prebuilt for less than the cost of equivalent components.
I guess it also matters what we define as a prebuilt. Some prebuilts are just standard components assembled (hopefully competently).
Some prebuilts, especially from Dell, HP, Acer and Lenovo will have custom motherboards, custom power supplies and custom cases that can't be re-used later on. Those usually have the very crappiest cooling solutions too. So they will end up costing you more money down the road, because you can't incrementally upgrade the pieces as much as you could with a self-built PC.
Computer Shopper was such an amazing magazine to go through, and I would always try and find the best deal from the systems advertised, not that I had any real money. Usually it was from the ads in the back, not the big pretty Gateway ads in the front.