07.03.06:
Building a budget PC for someone else

I have been given the task of building a budget PC to donate to an underprivileged family. I was given a budget of P10,000 to assemble the whole package (that should include the monitor, printer, and a computer table if possible). So I did some canvassing. I bought new parts: casing with psu/kybrd/mse/spkrs, cdrom drive, floppy drive from PC Express. As for the base components such as motherboard, processor, video card, memory, and hard drive — I bought used parts from friends and people from TipidPC. TipidPC is an online community-based website that basically draws hundreds of Pinoys to buy and sell computer parts online. I got a slightly-used AMD 1700 socket A processor at a bargain price of P1,500. I got a used 40G Seagate hard drive for the same price. Unfortunately, I just recently determined that the hard drive must be defective to begin with since I was unable to fully format it. Hopefully I can still find the person who sold it to me. TipidPC is a very good place to get used computer parts but you just have to be careful and be cautious always when buying from strangers.

So after several weeks of canvassing and buying used parts, I was able to complete the P10,000 budget PC. By the way, as for the monitor, I decided to have my old 15″ CRT monitor repaired for P850 and will give this as part of the PC package. I got all the parts to build the actual PC. I am still looking for a used printer and then hopefully get a used computer table for free.

This underprivileged family that I am helping have never had a PC before. Their children are about to go to high school and a PC will surely help them with their schooling. This budget PC I am building should give them the basic internet, word processing, gaming functionality of a good PC.

This entry was posted by Marc on Tuesday, March 7, 2006 under Hardware, Team Blog. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.