I personally have never bought a pre-built system. When I first started in computers, my dad had got an old system from a friend of his, which his friend had built. Since then, he and I built our own, and adamantly refusing to ever purchase a pre-built system for ourselves, as well as always recommended them to our friends.

About the only time we'd recommend buying something like a Dell or any of the other brands out there) was if the person had no intentions of upgrading the parts down the road (used to be an issue due to them all liking to use proprietary hardware and crap.. not so much of an issue now) and if they did not have someone who could be their Techie if it was needed. Of course.. building them yourself used to be cheaper.. now it's not as big of a price difference.

That said, I've never had any issues with a machine that I've built for myself. In doing so, I know *exactly* what I have in my machine, down to the tiniest detail, and had exactly what I wanted without having to sacrifice anything. Since I'm a techie geek I can troubleshoot my systems myself. Only real issue is when multiple parts go bad around the same time (and still under warranty), I have to make several differnet calls. However, I've never had to do that, but that'd be the only drawback in my eyes... having to call multiple places for getting RMA approval and such.