Preface:
ITT Albright talks about his experience building a computer. I'm sure some of you folks (like one of my college roommates) are already well-familiar with the process and could do it in your sleep, in which case you'll probably get no more amusement out of this thread besides whatever humor could be extracted from the accounts of my mistakes. So the purpose of this thread is to give an account of this experience for those who have not done so, but are considering doing it for the first time, as I did.

Why?
In college, I got an English degree. Just a bit of advice to anyone working or planning to work toward an English degree: Reconsider. A degree in basket weaving would be more practical, as many people are willing to pay for baskets. Not so many (in America, at least) are willing to pay for English.

While in college, I worked part-time for three years doing tech support for the school's computer labs. Since doing anything with the English degree didn't pan out, I thought going back into the tech field would be nice, but it turns out I'm unqualified (at least on paper) for any "real" tech jobs. So I decided to work toward getting a certification called A+ Core. This covers a lot of info on the workings of standard PC hardware and software; some common, some rather esoteric and/or antiquated. Anyway, many of the sources I saw about the test recommended having a computer we could take apart and examine whilst studying. That, combined with my desire to have a PVR but disgust at monthly rates TiVo and its ilk charge (I didn't need to pay a monthly rate to program my damned VCR!), led me to the decision that it was time to build my first computer.

My needs for the computer were this:

• It needed to get a TV signal into the computer to record from it. More on this later.
• It also needed TV-out capability to watch recorded shows.
• It needed to have a fairly spacious hard drive for storing recorded shows.
• It needed 802.11 wi-fi support. I'm done with wired internet.
• l33t 3D powah is unnecessary, as I won't be doing much gaming on this thing. Thus, a cheapo video card is acceptable, so long as it was connectable to a TV as mentionend above.
• Similarly, processor power beyond that necessary to simultaneously record one show while playing back another would be wasted, so a value-priced processor will work as well.
• I plan on running Linux on it, so I don't need to buy a copy of Windows. On the other hand, the components should be Linux-friendnly.
• Finally, it should be small and quiet.