Times are still tough out there, but our needs and desires don’t always flag just because the economy does. If an accident or an equipment failure has punched an unexpected hole in your computing life, you may be in need of a system—any system—to fill it. Or maybe you’ve discovered that your family just needs one more box to use as a Web terminal to keep the more powerful systems free more often. Whatever the circumstance, you may be tempted to drop $500 or even more on one of the cheaper, pre-fab models you can find at Costco, Wal-Mart, or from one of the major manufacturers. But once you’ve factored in all the attendant costs, taxes, and shipping, you could be spending a lot more than you planned—and that’s something to avoid, especially when every penny counts.

Even if you need a computer right away, there are plenty of good reasons to build one rather than buy one. You control the parts, so you get exactly what you need at the price you can best afford. You’re assured of being able to upgrade any (or all) of the pieces later, when you have more money to spend. And, perhaps most importantly, you get the satisfaction of doing it yourself and maintaining complete control over it from the very instant you open the boxes. No matter how little you want to drop, building your own computer is still the best way to go.

So we asked ourselves: What’s the lowest point at which these two goals could intersect? If we needed a simple computer right away, and wanted to spend as little as possible, what could we build? We knew we wanted to aim low, almost ridiculously low—so we decided on what seemed like almost an unthinkable total: $200, which would include everything needed for the base computer itself (but not counting the monitor, keyboard, and mouse, or tax and shipping charges).

Once we had our target price, we took to Newegg.com to see whether this could really be done. We spent hours researching all the possibilities, making swaps, compromises, and last-minute changes until we had all the parts for our impossibly inexpensive system that, amazingly, came in under budget.

We had met our goal—on paper. But there’s a lot more to any computer than just how it looks on a Web site or in the cells of an Excel spreadsheet. We needed to make sure the computer would meet our needs, and not be stuck functioning as a big steel paperweight. Read on for the details about how we built one of the least expensive computers we’ve seen, while learning a lot more than we expected about the difficulties of component shopping, the importance of knowing what you need (and what you’re willing to settle for), and the knowledge that what you get can sometimes be considerably more than just what you see.