I may need my head read, but...

[Fred Bloggs]

I can recommend buying your RAM from Crucial, Corsair or Kingston. I use any of those depending which happens to be cheapest for the best spec when I order. They all have on line configurators where you enter the MoBo details and up pops compatible RAM. It is so easy to fit RAM to a PC it is almost laughable.

I share the sentiments about the cost effectiveness of self build, but a DIY PC can be configured exactly as you need and you generally know exactly how to fix it if it breaks!

As I said above, recently, I've done both self built and bought ready built.

[NickFitz]

Another vote for Crucial. I ordered a RAM upgrade for my MacBook on their website at around half four or five in the afternoon; it arrived in the post the next morning

[cojak]

How easy is it to put extra RAM into a laptop Nick? I'd like to put another gig into my Asus...

[NickFitz]

How easy is it to put extra RAM into a laptop Nick? I'd like to put another gig into my Asus...

The MacBook is designed to make it pretty easy, and IIRC my old Toshiba was also as simple as removing a panel on the base and swapping it. I would imagine it's pretty straightforward on your Asus too, but you'd have to check the manual

Crucial's web site takes you through the process of specifying make, model and so on and then tells you exactly what you need to buy

[cojak]

Smashing - I may take a look..

[Fred Bloggs]

How easy is it to put extra RAM into a laptop Nick? I'd like to put another gig into my Asus...

Piece of cake. This ACER, I upgraded from 512mb to 4gb (Crucial RAM) and I guess I'll get another year or so of use from it for the ~£50 upgrade.

[Board Game Geek]

RH Posted : If you're right (and I hope you are), then how would you recommend starting?

Check out CustomPC magazine

Every month they do a round up of builds, from the thrifty, to the average, to the uber-spec.

They list all the components you need to get the build working, and various issues of the magazine have hands-on guides to help you.

Mrs BGG built her own PC, and she was well pleased with herself. Zero input from me, apart from revising some of the uber-spec components. (Basically, the uber-spec build recommended that for a 9% increase in frame rate, a graphic card costing £270 more was gratuitious.

I disagreed, since the whole point of the build was to max performance, with money no object at the time. I hit the top 1% in Futuremark which was important at that time, as it was a goal to strive for. Been there and done it now.

[NickFitz]

The first time I built a PC was using my Dad's old 80286 motherboard.

Much cooler than building a PC was the fact that my Dad, who had started out by buying a BBC Micro and relying on my guidance in the early Eighties, had replaced his 80286 with a 486DX2 and was saying, when I went home for Christmas, "Is this old motherboard any use to you?"

Having helped him through understanding Epson FX-80 control sequences in the early Eighties, to find him building himself a new PC was better than building one myself