I Am MAek Computar?

[Sage]

At the end of the day, a self-built computer will cost you slightly more, unless, as Meer already pointed out, you're going crazy high end.

There's more than that, though. A prebuilt has a warranty for the WHOLE machine. You don't have to know what's wrong if something fails, just that it's broken. Send it in and it's their problem. With a self-built, everything has its own warranty and it's up to you to find out what's wrong; most companies won't diagnose for you outside of their own product.

So for ease of use and peace of mind, prebuilt is better. That said I have a custom build, which is more... 'future proof;' they tend to be easier to upgrade in the long run. For example, my motherboard and power supply are overkill for what I'm running atm but that'll be good for later on. A prebuilt Dell, for instance, probably will be built to the very edge of its possible margins, with the cheapest parts available.

So, kinda depends. I find prebuilt computers have -really- dumb feature combinations, too. So that might be something you'd wanna look into. Why you'd have 12Gb RAM and an integrated vid card, for instance, if you're wanting a gaming rig, is beyond me.

It is shocking that a prebuilt is cheaper but it is what it is.

And I paid 50 bucks for a real copy of Win7 so I can't complain.