I've built my own PCs after paying and learning an expensive lesson buying a proprietary and high-end OS/2 PC at an employee discounted price of $5000 --an IBM PS/2 Micro-channel with IBM brand everything ie. IBM printer, mouse, keyboard, monitor, etc. (and extra $260 for a math coprocessor).

But with prices being what they are today for doing it yourself, I finally went back after several decades buying a similarly spec'ed pre-built PC again last year.

OMEN 35L Gaming Desktop GT16-1085m PC
AMD Ryzen™ 7 9800X3D
NVIDIA® GeForce RTX™ 5080
Kingston FURY 32 GB DDR5-6000

That's a good deal !

On 7/2/2026 at 10:44 AM, bofhlusr said:

expensive lesson buying a proprietary and high-end OS/2 PC at an employee discounted price of $5000 --an IBM PS/2 Micro-channel with IBM brand everything ie. IBM printer, mouse, keyboard, monitor, etc. (and extra $260 for a math coprocessor).

That takes me back a bit ... if that has been your only expensive lesson, then you done good!

With the direction Microsoft are going with their OS and consoles (nobody owns anything and must have an online account with MS), and nVidia/AMD is going with their empty AI hype-fest, and Micron moving on, and Intel doing ... what is Intel doing? Sony killing physical media. Every large corporations intent to move just above everything to "subscription/online" based. Add other political non-sense around US manufacturing wishful wonderland, I fully expect my current PC to be my last ... my next OS will likely be a Linux flavor ... take it out of the hands of corporate greed and into the hands of real intelligent people.

Edited 49 minutes ago49 min by SayAgain