There are those who hold that an easy install is best; put everything together and have the PC build run perfectly from the first time you touch the power button.  While it certainly makes everything smooth, you really aren’t going to learn anything from a nice build.  It is the nightmare installations, the bizarre hardware incompatibilities and the purely unique problems that teach you the tricks it takes to deal with PCs that do everything they can to leave your mind feeling bent, spindled, folded mutilated and molested before finally booting.  Take this fun trip through formatting as an example.  Other have CPUs that have stopped working, so they are getting it drunk on Everclear in the hopes that it will cooperate. 

Once you are running, tweaking is the next step.  AMD fans are loving Advanced Clock Calibration for bring extra cores to life on Black Edition Phenom IIs while others are trying to find an L3 cache on certain Athlon II CPUs.  Other forum members, a particular forum member of short stature who is serial modding addict for example, don’t search for the perfect case; they find a new one and Force it to perfection.  It does help when the hardware you want to play withhas been released to the public though.

You can also catch the latest audio version of the PC Perspective Podcast, hand edited by Ryan’s lucky new intern.