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Originally Posted by Chinney
What now, then, is the best PC choice these days. Not that I am in the market - just curious which way the other side is leaning. Build it yourself?
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No, Alienware is crap. They overcharge for their systems which are really no better than anyone else's systems.
In all honesty, I cannot think of a single PC company that doesn't make shit computers. Buying a desktop seems like a stupid thing to do. If you're not knowledgeable enough to build a PC on your own (which is not hard), then you probably shouldn't be using Windows. Really, that's how I see it. I use Windows because although it's not as good an OS as the Mac, it's good enough and it gives me endless freedom to mess with my hardware. I would see NO benefit in going to Windows if I didn't get this freedom. And Dell is known for limiting the expandability of their machines - their cases are hard to open, many of them don't have AGP slots, they have weird brackets for hard drives and optical drives, and in the past they've even messed with the voltage requirement in the RAM slots to force people into buying Dell RAM.
Hell, if you want a nicely built PC that's better than anything the big vendors can do, ask my brother. He's built quite a few PCs for his clients, and he's only 16! His most recent one he sold for $1,500, which ended up being about $50 less than a Dell with slightly lower specs. The parts cost him $1,250. Looks great too - all the parts (tower, LCD, keyboard, mouse, speakers) are jet black.
Really, building it yourself is the only way to go. It's not hard at all, and there are really great directions online. When I first built a PC in 2002, I had never done anything like it before, but I used Ars Technica's guide and everything went together fine. People are just afraid of doing it or think it takes too much time.