Foreword
I presume you’re reading this because you’ve either just bought this book, or you’re thinking of buying it. So let’s get that out the way now. Should you buy this book? Or, having bought it, should you be happy you did? The answer to both questions is yes. If the subject of building your own computer interests you—and why in the world are you reading this if it doesn’t?—then you need this book. You won’t find anything else like it.
That out of the way, we can look at the broader question of whether you should build your own computers.
As I look around Chaos Manor (http://www.jerrypournelle.com), I see that I have over 20 computers, all networked, and I built nearly every one of them myself. The exceptions are Princess, an ancient Compaq desktop professional workstation running dual Pentium Pro 200 MHz CPUs; a Mac; a TabletPC; and another laptop. No one in his right mind builds his own laptop or Tablet. I keep Princess because I’ve had her for a decade, and she hasn’t been shut down in more than a year, and I haven’t the heart to scrap her. Besides, she’s still useful for doing long web searches. Until fairly recently I had a Compaq professional workstation (dual 750 MHz Pentium III) as my communications system, but I retired it a few months ago in favor of a new 3 GHz built here, and since then every server and workstation added to the Chaos Manor network was built here. Clearly I must like building systems and using them.
It wasn’t always this way. Until a few years ago I ...
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