"Pfft. I could build a better computer than that myself."

Remember that? Remember how a run-of-the-mill, middle-of-the-road, off-the-rack PC setup like this would inspire a scornful scoff, followed by a quick mental inventory of all the superior components you could put together for less money?

There you were, on your living room floor, surrounded by zip ties and plastic motherboard spacers, wondering if your magnetic screwdriver just corrupted your hard drive, trying to remember what IRQ setting your Cuecat was using, and that damn thermal transfer paste all over everything. Then, when you finally got it all put together and turned it on, grabbing the manual to figure out what three long beeps and two short beeps means you did wrong.

It was great. And you’ll never do it again. Decent computers are pretty cheap. You are old. These days, it takes a lot more than saving a hundred bucks to get you crawling around on the floor for three hours.

Just out of curiosity, though… how would you outdo this HP Pavilion 500-217C for a lower price? It should be easy. Look at those specs. 8GB of RAM. 1TB hard drive. And just as a point of personal pride, you cannot let “integrated graphics” stand, even if they don’t suck as much as they used to. C’mon, you used to wipe chunks of unremarkable desktop PCs like this out of your beard.

Or maybe not. Maybe you just want a cheap desktop computer that can do basic Internet stuff and play Netflix and play most games as long as you degrade the graphics settings. That’s cool. We’ve got one of those.

But if you once fancied yourself a savvy constructor of systems and saver of money, there’s room down here on the floor with us in our forums. Take the challenge. Let us know how you’d build a better PC. Just keep that thermal transfer paste out of the carpet or Mom will kill us.