Dell Dimension 5000 - buy a PC, forget DIY building

With January sales causing a drop in PC prices, I succumbed and bought a new Dell Dimension. It has loads of USB sockets and a network card but the killer feature is that it's probably the quietest PC I've ever bought.

As the fifth Dell bought over fifteen years, I had stopped buying Dells 5 years ago after they sold me one that never went wrong. This Pentium 3 - 550MHz chugged along nicely for months on end. It was rarely switched off. What helped was thar I'd Ghosted the OS partition at its zenith of reliability and once a year I'd refresh the OS - usually this was after some application misbehaved. Over time I added a video card, a hard disc and some memory to take it through the Windows 2000 and XP eras. The XPS T550 was fairly quiet too but for heavy duty jobs like video editing I used a series of self build PCs .

I look back at this era of DIY PC building as my misguided years. Every building project has been frought with assembly, dissassembly and system hiccups. It's best left to people who have a well-stocked workshop and time to kill. Any money saved has to be balanced against what's involved - even if it is easy and educational. In fact a small fortune was spent on quiet PSU's, new fans and silent flower-style heatsink coolers. On one PC alone that came to £150 ($250) . After deducting £150 for a Dell FP monitor, the near-silent Dimension 5000 cost £250. This was Dell number 5. A zealot I've become.


History
No 1: Dell 486 - ran on Windows 3 - reliable - left running for months.
No 2: Dell Pentium I - 133 MHz - Windows 95 - fairly good - ransacked for parts. Heatsink is now a business card holder.
No 3: Dell Pentium II - 266 MHz - Windows 98 - never happy - used as a music server
No 4: Dell Pentium III - 550MHz - Windows 2000 - still going 2005