I recently came back from vacation to find that my primary desktop at home (a Dell Unit) was not booting up and the only indicator was a slowly blinking yellow power light. After some investigation, it turned out that this was due to a bad power supply. On top of that, it appeared that the power supply fried the motherboard on its way to the land of no return. My first inclination was to buy another brand name computer. But in shopping around, I really was not happy with choices that were being offered, so decided to go the custom build route. Although I have built multiple computers in the past, I have not been keeping up with the current hardware esoterica, so got some recommendations from folks at work that led to a pre-built list of computer parts through the SlickDeals forum. An additional criteria was that since I had a copy of Windows Vista Ultimate lying around that I still had not installed on any of my systems, and since Vista SP1 had come out, I wanted this to be a machine that was capable of running Vista. It took me 2-3 hours to put the system together on a Saturday with the additional benefit that it was a cool thing to do with the kids. I am happy to note that all of the parts work together seamlessly, have full Vista driver support and once Vista SP1 and all of the latest updates were installed, I have a very smooth running machine. While my Aero score was not at the top end, it still is enough to give me the full Aero ...
Anytime
