Not sad at all, in fact really courageous. The journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step. You can learn quickly, so be patient. Anandtech has lots of useful guides, and the people in the General Hardware Forum will help. If you pick a T-bird as your CPU choice you will need a T-bird motherboard of which there are several variaties and many brands. The t-Bird is comming out in a new form that runs at 266 up from the older 200s etc. Take some time and read the guides, reviews, news, etc. Have fun.