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Buy or Build

Unless you have a really good reason, and you know whats inside a PC, don't build one. PCs are so well priced these days that you can get a really well spec'd PC that will last you for years to satisfy all your surfing, document writing and photo needs.

A good reason... well, unless you have special graphics needs like serious gamers, or professional video editing, or some special data processing need you don't have a good reason. You may be able to save perhaps £100 by getting all the components separately but you'll lose all the testing that the big manufacturers put in. Not to mention the difficulties you'll end up with should it not work !

A computer is a machine for manipulating data according to a list of instructions - a program. Computers are versatile. In fact, they are universal information processing machines. According to the Church-Turing thesis, a computer with a certain minimum threshold capability is in principle capable of performing the tasks of any other computer, from those of a personal digital assistant to a supercomputer, as long as time and memory capacity are not considerations. Therefore, the same computer designs have been adapted for tasks from processing company payrolls to controlling unmanned spaceflights. Modern electronic computers also have enormous speed and capacity for information processing compared to earlier designs, and they have become exponentially more powerful over the years (a phenomenon known as Moore's Law).