A Just curious question

[DREDIOCK]

Purely curious
What is the downside to some of these machines Such as "Emachines" , "Compaq", Dell, Etc you can get at places like Best Buy etc over building your own?

Was in Best buy yesterday  picking up a new mouse and was just looking at them.
Some it seems are similarly priced to what you can get if you build it yourself.

Inferiour parts? Or is it just that special pride in being able to say "I built it?"

[Seeker]

Upgradeability; coupled with the fact that these standard; budget PC's are usually built with standard; budget components.

In short; they're a good bet if you're prepared to treat them like cars; buy them new; use them roughly and throw them away used for what ever you can get for them after 3 - years; as they'll no longer be competative and they'll be too much hassle to upgrade.

Whereas a home built computer answers to the old phrase "that old broom with many a new head and handle...."  You'll be buying "stuff" for your home built machine after only two years (Ram and graphic card); but you'll be able to keep it competative for anywhere between 3-5 years; and you'll be able to recycle some componants into "machine #2" after that 3 - 5 year time period.

[eagl]

It's also unlikely that you'll get one of those supermarket computers with a decent video card for gaming, and that means you have to be very careful to get one that has an AGP slot for a better vid card.  Many come with integrated graphics and simply can't be upgraded at all.  Dell is notorious for this, because they have great prices on their lower couple of models, but they only have PCI slots.  Why they'd bother including pci slots but still leav out an AGP slot is beyond me, but that's what they do.