Nosh Builds a PC - And Rises from the Dead!

To all and sundry who have followed the shambles that is HardlyAChannel for any length of time will know that i (Nosh) have been using what could only loosely be termed a PC. I am of course referring to the loving known "Hunk of Junk" that was my laptop. It is safe to say it was never meant for gaming and in fairness it was never meant for it either. However i valiantly tried to put its poor inadequate silicon coated ass through its paces and unsurprisingly it failed miserably.  It's greatest success was being able to play LOL with almost every setting at minimum.

I bring you news of both great joy and sorrow, the laptop is dead! Don't mourn for it as i shan't, in it's later months i had more BSOD than i could possibly count and it had to be propped up on four candles to even manage to stay on for more than an hour. However, from the ashes of the laptop and a few new parts a ugly miss-shapen phoenix has arisen! I won't lie it isn't pretty and it won't be winning any awards for cable management or sheer power. It does on the plus side work and has only BSOD once since i painstakingly built it without frying anything with static two weeks ago. 

View Inside: No Cable managment

What are its specs you may ask, well don't hold your breath it isn't anything special and still needs a few more components. However here they are none the less:

• i3-3220 Intel Processor
  

• MSI Z77A-G43 Motherboard
  

• 8GB 1600MHz XMS3 DDR3 Corsair RAM
  

• 500W OCZ Core X Stream Power Supply
  

• 300GB SATA HDD (Salvaged from Laptop)
  

• Case with big Internet Explorer symbol on the side (Case from my Grandad's PC from 10 years ago!)
  

So there you go, it's never going to set the world on fire but it is already vastly faster and more stable than my laptop.

The observant amongst you may have noticed there is no optical drives, this isn't a deliberate choice but more of a unforeseen issue in the fact the current ones have IDE connectors only. So future additions aside from an optical drive will include a dedicated graphics card as i'm currently using onboard graphics. A new hard drive, probably an SSD and maybe a 1/2/3 Terabyte hard drive. A new case with cable management and the ability to have case fans! Any thoughts/recommendations on any of these parts or anything else i may need to put in feel free to comment.

How did i find the experience of building a PC? All in all i enjoyed it, apart from the constant thought if i drop the bits or gather any static then i might break/fry something! May need to invest in an anti-static wristband to mitigate the static issue. Aside from coming out with a working PC and the satisfaction of having achieved something; my favorite part of the experience was finding out in true Hardly fashion that Simon and Jamie, the supportive friends they are had ruled me dead and started dividing my belongings over twitter after not hearing from me for a number of hours after commencing the build! 

So, the rumors of my death were greatly exaggerated and this is Nosh, Signing Out!

Link to the rest of the badly shot, out of focus franken PC pics: http://imgur.com/a/GApD6