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If You Want It Done Right, Do It Yourself

One of the minor irritations of life today is the amount of software junk that is delivered with a new PC. You know the deal: You bring home your brand new machine. You place it on your desktop with reverent hands, looking forward to booting up a machine absolutely clean of viruses, spyware, adware -- a machine whose Registry is pristine and free of anything that will slow this sucker down. Right.

You plug it in. You turn it on. And you feel your blood pressure rise as you stare at a desktop full of "helpful" icons that indicate your machine has been loaded with scads of crippleware -- courtesy of the manufacturer's various business partners, who hope that you'll try out their wares and buy the full, working version.

The result? The next hour on your wonderful new machine is spent cleaning it up: uninstalling the financial app that doesn't import any of your existing files, and the image editor that seems geared to the understanding of a five-year-old, and the music player that urges you to upgrade every five minutes... It's a mess.

One way to avoid this kind of mishigas is to build your own PC. This not only gives you exactly the machine you're looking for without all the unwanted extras, but it offers you the chance to really learn what makes a computer tick. Bill O'Brien, a friend and colleague from way back, e-mailed me about a week ago to tell me that he'd just assembled his ideal media PC using a sexy new case from Antec and had written up a blow-by-blow. He had been planning to put the article on his blog, but I could get first dibs on it if I wanted.

Yeah. I wanted.

The result is How To Build A High-Class Media PC With Antec's Fusion Media Center Case, which details (in Bill's inimitable voice) what he decided to put in the case and how well all the components worked together. In the end, he's got a media PC that does the job, and does it exceedingly well. It's got the hardware he wants, the software he wants, and it's even got a nice big volume knob so Bill no longer has to grab for the mouse when the neighbors call to complain.

If you're a True Geek, you'll also have to check out Bill's examination of the speed difference between SATA drives with horizontal and vertical recording schemes: Best Bits: Perpendicular Versus Horizontal Drive Technology. And then there's Eric's Hall's examination of how to get a "skinny" version of the Windows XP Recovery Console onto a custom CD so that you can recover from, say, a corrupted system boot record. All very useful stuff for those who know their bits and bytes.

Building and maintaining a really sharp PC takes time, and you don't want to have to deal with interruptions -- like an employee, or your Uncle Phil, calling to tell you about a worm that they accidentally picked up while surfing through their favorite stamp-collecting sites. You may want to point them to Preston Gralla's rundown of 10 Free Ways To Keep Your PC Safe. You could learn something new -- and you'll get links to some effective (and free) security software, anonymizers, and other useful stuff. You could also send them to Serdar Yegulalp's review of Five Firewalls For Your Desktop PC, which examines the five best-known software firewalls from McAfee, Microsoft, Symantec, Trend Micro, and Zone Labs.

(Incidentally, if you've used a lesser-known firewall that blows away anything produced by these guys, let me know -- we're thinking of a follow-up and would welcome suggestions as to great firewalls we may not know about.)

So what is the moral of this particular story? That there are no real shortcuts where technology is concerned. If you need a PC right now, this minute, you can go online, choose a machine, type in your credit card number, and get a PC shipped overnight to your office -- but you're going to have to deal with the unwanted software that it comes with. (Including, if you're a Linux fan, Microsoft Windows -- but let's not go there right now.) If, on the other hand, you are particular about exactly what components and software sits in your desktop case, and you've got the tech smarts to do it, you can still build your own.

What do you prefer? When you need a new PC, do you build your own, or do you have other things to do with your time? Let me know.

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