OTHER
MEETINGS

The Meeting for Thursday, March 12, 2009, will be

Given by: John Sanders
Of: ORPCUG

On: Build your own PC

Actually, building your own PC is not such a challenge as you might think, and there are many positives resulting from this task. First of all, you will get just the features that you want/need to perform the tasks that you most frequently encounter on the PC. Second, you will be very familiar with "what's under the hood," and you will be in a better position to correct problems that you may encounter during operation. And you will probably find that you will get more of the PC that you want for less money.

There are a number of online resellers of computer components, and you can pick the best parts for your PC as the lowest cost. They are made to "fit together" if you chose the components correctly. This is probably the area in which you will need to exercise the most care. Note that we are talking about desktop computers; laptop computers need to "fit togother" in a very small volume, and some of these components must be especially for that application.

First of all, you should deside exactly what tasks will be met through the use of this computer. A PC that is just used to access the internet and read mail and get information would be different from one that is used to keep track of your money or one that is used to publish either to the internet or to hard copy.

Based on the planned uses, you can select the processing speed that you will need, the amount of memory, the storage devices, and the other peripherals. At the same time, you can select the software that will be your operating system. After that, you can select the various components that will work well togehter.

The parts that you will consider (not necessarily in the order) are:

• A motherboard
• A CPU chip
• Memory (RAM)
• A case
• A power supply
• A video card
• Other memory storage units
• Other items such as sound, disply, keyboard, mouse, etc.
• Operating system and other software

We will discuss some of the options for each of these components and how to select those components that will work together to meet your computing needs. We will also go over some information on the relative cost of some of these options.

We will have our Question and Answer session about other topics and problems, as usual.

Happy St. Patrick's Day!