My wife Michelle is in need of a new computer. So my usefulness factor has just increased 10 fold.

Her current system is an aging 3-4 year old computer that I passed onto her when I got a new system 2 years ago.

This will in turn be passed onto my mother-in-law, who currently shares and fights over this computer with my wife. They mainly use it for a few games from PopCap, word processing, photo editing and printing and spending hours upon hours watching Korean Dramas.

I was considering buying a prebuilt computer system but these things swayed me away from that idea:

• it’s a lot cheaper - don’t have to pay for labor
• you get to choose quality components rather than rely on generic parts packaged into the system
• I get to get my hands dirty building a PC which I enjoy and haven’t done for a year or two now.