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Why don't people buy the PC with all the specs they expect to need in future (memory, hard drive, wifi, ports, etc.), but rather, they buy a tower (usually) because, they reason, a tower has more rooms in case they need upgrades or adding a 2nd/3rd drive, etc. etc.? Besides, after a few years they can sell the PC and buy a new one which will have more improved features with the technology advance. So why keep a desktop for 10 years and keep adding/upgrading it?
I put a few hundred dollars a year in my PC. Remove USB 1.0 card, add USB 3.0 card. Upgrade video. Upgrade power supply. Etc. Can't do much of that on a laptop.
ETA: Had this tower since 2010, and it still rocks the Casbah.
The only advantage laptops have over a tower is mobility and compactness. If that's what you want/need and don't mind paying a few extra bucks go for it.
Towers are cheaper to buy, cheaper to maintain, easy upgrades etc. If I go buy a new tower I don't need to spend money on a keyboard, monitor etc which is going to be built into the price of laptop.
I build my own PC's, the last one cost about $1300 a few years back, you might be able to buy something comparable at Best Buy for about $600 to $700 now. I recently somehow managed to corrupt both BIOS chips on the mobo, I had new one soldered on for cost of $40 including the chip. Had that failed I could of got a new mobo for about $150+/-... no sense throwing away a SATA3 SSD and other things like a blue ray drive.
There is not a whole lot to learn, you just plug stuff in. There is plenty of tutorials on the internet and all the motherboards I have purchased come with very good manuals. It's worth it if you are going to buy an expensive computer, not so much for mid range and definitely not for low range.
For that few hundred you could replace it with a new PC with updated technology.
That's not true at all, especially in gaming. A good video card ALONE is "a few hundred dollars".
If I spent $1,500 today to build a tower, it would be pretty top of the line. Something that would cost at least $2,000 retail. That's just a ballpark on the amount of money you could save. I could be low on that.
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Where/how did most people learn it?
Well, in the old days we learned by doing. Today there's this thing called the internet. Did you really just ask that?
Many people BUY so they can upgrade, but few do so. I build my own too, but only upgrade any component every few years, and less frequently these days, since the pace of hardware improvements have slowed (or maybe its my needs that have slowed?)
I build my own so that I can customize to my needs, such as front panel connections like firewire (for a legacy device. Try finding that on a commercial box, and to handle my collection of HDD and SSD.
Building your own can be time consuming, especially with finding and loading all the latest drivers for your MOBO, video card and network adapter if not on the MOBO. And I'm tech support if something goes wrong.
Unless someone needs space for extra drives, I think towers are a bad way to go these days.
For that few hundred you could replace it with a new PC with updated technology.
Only if you are buying low end throw away machines. My current build from 2012 will still run circles around any budget machine built today, and like others my video card alone was $450+.
As already pointed out, most of us do incremental upgrades year after year. My current tower and monitors would cost about $3000 to build outright today, but I've spread that cost over the last 4+ years (my case is from 2008, and the DVD is probably close to that old).
I built my current tower in 2012 for about $1000, but I reused several parts from my existing tower at the time, including the video card, case, power supply, DVD drive, and one hard drive. I also kept my monitors, mouse, keyboard, etc.
In 2013 I upgraded my monitors and video card (2 monitors were from 2005 or before, and one from 2008, the video card was from 2009 or '10).
In 2014 I upgraded the 1TB HDD (from 2010) to a 2 TB HDD, and added a second SSD.
I also replaced the PSU at some point in '13 or '14 (I purchased it in 2010), and last year the mother board failed and I replaced it (I believe that these are the only two failures I've had, but there might have been a DVD along the way).
This year I replaced my mouse, and a new keyboard is next on the list (but my mice tend to be in the $70 - $100 range, and keyboards more than that).
By the end of the year I'll replace the 2TB hard drive with a 4TB one, and replace one or both of the 256 GB SSDs with 512 GB or larger ones.
I'll probably replace the video card and monitors again in 2017, and after that I'll replace the mother board, CPU, and RAM (as a group) and probably the case.
Building your own can be time consuming, especially with finding and loading all the latest drivers for your MOBO, video card and network adapter if not on the MOBO.
Gigabyte mobo's come with disc however I just go to their site to get latest and/or reference for what I need. Each mobo has it's own driver download section with selection for OS. One thing to be careful about is what they have on their site has been tested with the hardware, the latest form manufacturer may have compatibility issues.
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Unless someone needs space for extra drives, I think towers are a bad way to go these days.
The big advanatge is more bang for your buck even if you are buying it pre built, this is especially true if you already have the peripherals like the monitor, keyboard etc. .
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