DIY

DIY or do it yourself is a good way to learn about the stuff that you buy and use everyday. For us in Korea it has saved us loads of money whenever a pc would break down.

I remember back in Alaska I saw a sign outside of a computer shop. The sign said that they do upgrades for something like 50 bucks and up for RAM upgrade, the price range went higher the more the RAM was upgraded. Of course the price of the chips are factored into the price, but really nowadays PC components and even some laptop spare parts can be had very cheaply. Your basically paying someone quite a bit of cash to stick a pc chip onto your motherboard. This situation gets worse when you consider PC crashes, and other hardware failures. People panic and drop loads of cash on an issue that can be diagnosed, and repaired cheaply and sometimes rather quickly.

For example you boot up your PC and you hear a looooooong beep sound, but the monitor remains blank, but you can hear your fans running inside of the case. Or you get a message saying that bios can not find a boot device. If you take this to a computer shop a honest shop will only replace what needs replacing. Other places will bring your pc back with new innards that you simply do not need. It happened here in Korea. My Boss had me check on of our PC's because it was having the blue screen of death (BSOD). I quickly researched the error code and told her that is a simple error, just replace the graphics cards. The graphics card failed. That is a relatively cheap and fast fix as office graphics cards can be bought second hand, and even new they are still rather cheap. I was too busy to do the work, so my boss sent it to get "fixed".

Afterwards I popped open the case, and laughed. The fool or should I say clever person, replaced the motherboard, ram, and graphics card. Totally the cost was still low but at least 3 times what it should have been.

So to all of you out there DIY isn't as scary as it seems. Download some videos, talk to your friends, chances are you have someone who can help you without charging an arm and a leg.