How old were you when you first built your PC?

My first PC, I was 24, my first computer was when I was 10. It was a Sinclair ZX80 in kit form from the news paper. I had to solder chips and resistors onto a PCB. However, some of the parts were faulty and it never booted so I had to send it back to Cambridge Research for testing. They sent it back working and with replacement resistors.
 
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I only got my first PC at about 16. I installed hard drives and memory upgrades, but we didn't have any money so it was basically stuff other people gave away.

Did my first proper build at uni - about 20.
 
Mid 30s (in the late 1990s).

Had laptops before this and purchased our first family PC from Tiny Computers (yes, i'm fully aware of how badly I was ripped off).

When this started to slow down after a couple of years and being an electronics technician myself, I thought "How hard can this be?" and had a go.

Built 2 more since and upgrade something every year once the laggiest item has a replacement with good VFM.
 
I dabbled in upgrading PCs from 14-15 maybe, Frankensteining a load of OEM computers together, but my first build from Retail components was around 16.
 
Shortly after I first started work so 16-17. It was when the Pentium 4 Northwood's were out. I think I had 512MB of SD RAM and an Nvidia GeForce 4 Ti4400.
 
2004 was my first self build so I was 37 at the time. Had a couple of pre-built pc's before that and it was only after the last one that I had failed after 1 year and a couple of days and the retailer didn't want to know (they have gone bust since then so karma kicked in) that I started looking into building my own.
 
Saved up enough money to buy 2nd hand parts for my 15th birthday. Put it all together but it kept tripping out after 2 seconds. After a couple of days of racking my brain, my dad paid his mate £50 to have a look at it for me.

Turns out the case/mobo spacers ARE needed. Never made that mistake again!
 
I saved up and build my own at 16. Before that I upgraded the PC in the living room but it wasn't private enough to, erm, watch football videos on, so I build one in my room :-)
 
First PC I built on my own, I was 16 or 17, almost all the parts were purchased from forums, I funded the whole thing from my part time job I had while at college, buying a few components each month. I'll never forget when I agreed a good price to buy a 9700 pro :D

As for tinkering with computers though, since as far as I can remember I was in charge of fixing the family PC :) recommending to my dad we get another stick of 64mb ram so windows 98 would run faster :D (I'm 31 this month)
 
Think it was around 17 - 18 years for a full PC build.

Prior to that my first proper gaming PC was a £1.5k top of the range Advent PC :D

Started tinkering by swapping in new memory, gfx etc until the Athlon couldn't take it anymore and then went to the dark side of C2D until backing AMD again a couple of years ago.

Probabally in the last 11 years or so I have only had 3 PC's. The only one I ever upgraded was the Advent. Not too bad!
 
29. Had a mate build me one a year or so earlier which I kind of helped with, but it wasn't really much of a joint effort. First one I sourced and put together completely myself was an AMD Clawhammer/6800GT rig.

I was incredibly nervous as I had very little money at the time and couldn't afford to replace any parts if I messed up. I remember not really feeling sure what I was doing, finding it all a bit fiddly and sweating profusely throughout the whole build.
 
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