Building own PC may be struggle
Q. Does it make any sense these days to build your own computer? Can you do it cheaper if you build it yourself versus buying from someone like Dell or HP?
A. Determining if building your own computer makes any sense or not depends on a few factors. The most important one being: Do you know how to build your own computer?
Like many computer enthusiasts, I have given in to the urge to build my own computer in the past, but I don’t really think it saved me any money.
If anything, it was probably more expensive because as an individual I simply can’t get the same discount on computer parts that larger vendors like Dell can get because of their bulk purchases.
For me it was more about the challenge and experience than anything else. But I have not built my own PC in a very, very long time, and I don’t think I will again anytime soon.
For most people, it’s simply not worth the frustration and time it can take to build a PC. And even if you do build it successfully, you are sacrificing any of the technical support and warranty work you would get with a pre-built, namebrand PC. For some, this is not a problem. For others, it can be quite a nightmare.
One of the major benefits of buying name brand is that if it does not work you can take the whole thing back to the store or to the manufacturer and demand satisfaction — as long as you are within the warranty or exchange period.
Q. Can you recommend a good program for working with video files? I don’t want to edit the videos. I simply want to convert them to other formats and compress them so they are a bit smaller and easier to work with.
A. High-end video applications such as Adobe Premier and Final Cut Pro will do this, but they also provide very advanced video editing capabilities that make them much more complex to use for something like this. And they’re expensive.
When I need to convert video files, I like to use a program called HandBrake from www.handbrake.fr. HandBrake is a free, open source video transcoder that works very well for the kind of thing you want to do. You can convert video from any format to any other format, including compressed formats such as MP4 and MKV.
I use this program frequently for converting video I want to embed in my website or send via email when those video files are otherwise too big.
There are tutorial pages on the web that explain how to use HandBrake.