Me and my girlfriend decided we needed a computer to help us do our computer related university courses. We looked at all the pre-built 'top end' desk top computers and discovered they were out of our small sized student budget. So we decided that we had to build our own, we didn't have a clue about computers to begin with but soon got up to speed with decent research. The best places for research are web-sites and the big pc magazines. Most of your time should go on the research of the motherboard as this is the hub of your computer. The motherboard what components will go in the computer( e.g. amd or intel). It is worth spending alot on your motherboard because it will be more upgradeable and will be more future proof (it is easyier to upgrade the components that go into the board than changing the motherboard itself), like the saying go's building 'good foundations.....' etc. We bought an Asus p3v4x motherboard(see my opinion), 128 mbs of ram, celeron 433mhz processor,seagate barracuda 20 gigs hdd. We decided that it was not worth spending alot on the processor as they get out of date so quickly that there is no point buying the quickest as things like ram and the speed of the hdd effect performance just as much. The rest is easy and then you have put it together, a bit like lego but the parts are more expensive and a bit larger. Putting the leads in the right places is probably the hardest bit, but the motherboard manual should tell you how to that. We ordered all our parts from dabs.com, insight, jungle and simply.co.uk internet sights and found them to be good value ( especially dabs = free delivery). We have added other components as our budget allowed, that is the advantage of building your own. Don't be scared its dead easy.