Holla, boyos.

I'm currently trying to help a friend get herself a new computer, however, I face a few obstacles to truely be able to help her.

First off, I used to be much more computer savvy 2 years ago when I spent 3 months reading article after article while I was building my computer. Obviously, things have changed since and I've forgotten some of the lingo, so it leaves me a little less confident with my suggestions.

Secondly, I'm 1300some miles away, so obviously I cannot bring a physical help to building the computer. This poses my biggest dilemna. We were looking at Dell and Alienware prebuilt computers, but really, they just did not please me (or her) at all. They were expensive and to be honest, several parts felt quite sub-par for the price asked. However, ordering parts from Newegg means that she'd need to put it together on her own. Computers are not, in my mind, you blindly put together from parts. You need to know what you are doing, so that it may work properly.

I'm not out in the US so I do not know what kind of services are available. Can a person go to a Best Buy / Geek Squad with parts and pay them to build the computer? Are there stores that offer this sort of service?

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Now for the computer itself, I've looked at few things yesterday but really, I felt overwhelmed by the new labels and numbers. We're looking at a budget of 800$ - 1000$ US, and want to build a computer that she can play video games on, and will last her a good few years (obviously wont be able to run video games at maxed out in a few years.)

Could any of you offer some advice, pc suggestions, or any other help that might be useful?

If it sounds fun to you, putting together a list of parts that would make a good PC, for the budget I'm looking at, would be very very useful!

Even if Best Buy or a similar retail outlet would assemble the parts you ordered I think they would charge you so much that it would negate any of the savings.

I think your best option would be to shop around many of the custom computer websites and see if they offer the components you want.

Sites like:

ibuypower.com
buyxg.com
cyberpowerpc.com

Look in an computer-related magazine the ad pages are full of similar vendors.

This would be my build suggestion, but it's $900 + shipping without monitor.

buy linux lololololol

ARGH, .BMP

buy a mac

i was about to suggest this... as far as "custom" prebuilt computers capable of gaming their prices are much more reasonable compared to dell and alienware

I am stealing your bandwidth!

More like wasting our time. Fix the friggin image.

Use my screenshot tool.

http://x.mzzt.net/EasyScreenshot.NET.exe

uuhhh, executable from untrusted source??!?

it's mzzt... you can trust him with the credit card information his program sends him

putting a PC together is not really any harder than hooking up a console to a TV. It's all just plug ins that are shaped to fit the holes they go in.

The hard part is getting the OS installed and getting all of your drivers to function how they are supposed to.

You should probably get 8 GB of RAM. See, in a few years, when you want to add more RAM, the cost for your then-outdated DDR2 will be through the roof. If I want to buy DDR1 RAM for my other system, it costs a small fortune. I would have been better off being it in excess when it was cheap.

I bought a computer on ibuypower.com years and years ago and it was a good deal IMO and it worked great, never had any problems with it. I don't know what its like now, but they used to be a good deal.

Just write instructions, pack some pictures in with it. If she's any good at following directions, she'll get it done.