Good PC wana build it

ITtim

Have you considered looking at a second hand pc?

you may find one that suits your requirements on ebay. or a cheap one that you can upgrade. For example. you could get a cheap machine and salvage the case, psu, floppy, cd rom, hdd and just replace the motherboard cpu and memory. Incidentaly you'll find that 256 is enough for windows xp, sure 512 would be great but id sugest going with 256 and upgrading later if its a problem. We run over 100 pc's here with 256mb on win xp and providing your not doing anything too intensive its fine.

wolfman

For that size of budget, I wouldn't think it'd be worth building your own machine.

From my experience, it becomes more worth while when you you get closer to a £350-400 budget.

For that kind of budget I'd either look to get a second hand machine, or buy a Dell or similar.

dccarm

It'd be worth it for the satisfaction of building your own machine though! I built me dad's PC for £140, but I was in the lucky position of already having Windows 98 to load on to it. If you already have an old PC then you should be able to strip the CD ROM and floppy drive from it, and possibly some of the cables. Then make sure you get a motherboard with onboard graphics - for your purposes you won't need a graphics card.

The real killer on your budget will be the operating system.

Tom_Jones

Don't think you'll get much cheaper than here, ready built but start at £250

http://www.pcspecialist.co.uk

superscotsman

The electronics firm maplin is pretty good for providing the bits and the know-how. Building your own PC is a piece of !!!!!!. The one I am using now I built myself. There is one pitfall that I should point out to you. When you get your motherboard, go to the maker's site and check what Gigabyte hard drive it will support. The one I am using at the moment is a bit old and will only support 32. Therefore if you buy a 40 it will not work, and uless you know what you're about, you won't know why. You can juggle about with jumpers and reformat to get 32 out of a 40, but it is easier to just buy a 20, or, of course, get yourself a new motherboard. That is really the only major pitfall.
Anyone who could assemble their own computer was laughing at the money he saved in the past. However, labour is so cheap out in the far east, and with modern manufacturing methods, this is no longer the case, and you could pick up a patent computer at a cheaper price than you can build one for.

Fraserca

Approach a local computer shop - If they won't do it then they may recommend a local 'expert' who will built a computer for you and show you how its done.

Good luck