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What a great post! I did not read every word, very complicated at some points.

It caught my eye as my husband and I had a computer hardware business in the 90's. We built our own pc's custom for our customers, mostly programmers and graphics artists.

Bought our first 8088, a clone in about '82, a clone of an IBM, 2 8" floppys, and I think 286k in memory? Everyone we knew wanted one, so we became a dealer and started selling them. We liked the open architecture of the PC verses the Mac, later we built our systems, to easily upgrade with more memory and a faster processor. We went through the 286, the 386 and the 486 chips and thought AMD was superior to Intel in every way.

In the early nineties we took our system to the Microsoft labs so they could test it with the new version of software they were releasing. They give the different hardware manufacturers a certain routine to run to see how fast it is. Ours finished 8 hours before the others, they thought it was broken, turned out it was just very fast, every Microsoft NT programmer brought one from us after hearing about it!!!

The days of 2,3,and 486’s were heady days with a new, faster processor coming out every several weeks or few months. I always had to get the newer machine. I loved the AMD chips, cheaper and ran as well as most Intel chips but the AMD chips could be pushed up with higher clock speeds if you were willing to cool the chip. I had a lot of fun with those chips but now my phone will do more than they could even pushed.

I have been holding off upgrading to an I7 from my AMD FX, now I know what I was waiting for.

***** We built our own pc’s custom for our customers, mostly programmers and graphics artists.*****

Since 1996, I’ve bought only 1 pre-built computer and that was a a AST 133 Cyrix. From then on, it was a custom built system done by a couple of friends from where I work.

Still...BSOD’s on every build. Finally, a little over 3 years ago, I decided to do it myself and this time no shortcuts on any of the components. I started watching the How To Build A Computer videos on Newegg.

Then I saw on YouTube a builder named Carey Holzman and started learning from him.

https://www.youtube.com/user/CareyHolzman/videos

I ordered from Newegg, an Intel DH87MC motherboard. Probably the one of the last they made. An Intel i5 4440 processor, Corsair HX750 PS, 32gb Kingston HyperX 1600 memory, Windows 7 Pro x64, LG DVD, Samsung SSD and a Corsair Vengeance C70 case.

Followed Holzman’s guidelines, took my time assembling, did a POST and installed Windows and all the updates. In over 3 years I have not had a single BSOD or any of those nagging hair pulling system crashes. This is by far and away the best computer I’ve ever owned. It won’t set any performance records but stability was what I was most concerned about.

In Nov 2015 I built my wife a higher end computer with a middle of the road EVGA card. On her system, I went with the Intel i7-4670K, Gigabyte board, Samsung 27” monitor, Cooler Master case and 32gb GSkills 1600 memory. Same brand PS but different model #, Samsung SSD, W7 Pro x64 & LG DVD.

So far, she claims she has not had even one crash.