Known to be working in the computer industry, acquaintances still regularly ask me about buying computers. My generic advice over the last few years has been to spend no more than 5-800 bucks and avoid high-end machines. Clearly even low-end computers nowadays are perfectly adequate for most ordinary uses.

But what should I do when I am shopping around for something sufficient for the next few years of my unordinary uses? Several times over the last few decades, I assembled or specified new workstations from particular high-end parts. That was because ordinary mass-produced machines were not up to tasks like heavy-duty programming, database and web serving, guest account hosting, and the other sorts of things that the machine that served you this web page generally occupies itself with. Every four or so years, I try to jump up by about a factor of six in performance and storage, and it’s about time to make the next jump.

Unfortunately, the task is not so simple as I remember it previously being. There are many mutually incompatible physical shapes for key parts like motherboards, processors, memory, storage, and a disconcerting variety of cases and other options. There is a shortage of mail-order retailers through which one could buy every part for home assembly. There are so many variants of common parts that the higher-end ones end up being only rarely carried in catalogues, let alone in stock. There is a fashion in “gamer” products which feature one specific type of high performance, but couples those with repulsive ostentation and a general lack of balance.

And I am not new at this stuff-it’s really that the complexity and variation have exploded over the last few years. So I’m on the prowl, but not making a lot of progress.

UPDATE 2004-09-30: gamepc, a US mail-order firm, appears willing to assemble even acceptably high-end computers.