Originally posted by Savaric
I'm intrigued by building my own. It does sound fun and I could do it (assembly) with confidence, but it falls back on warranty and convenience.
All you need is a bit of screwdriver nous and some common sense, and you can put a computer together (eg the CPU will come with complete instructions on how to install it into a mainboard). However, even a reknowned geek can botch things when building a computer - *blush* Can't remember what I did, but I got something pretty obvious wrong, like forgot to plug something in, or something, and it took me rather too long to figure it out.

Warranty - as has been mentioned earlier, all your components should have warranties. Instead of having a wnty on the computer, which means you have to take the whole thing back if anything fails, you have a warranty on the hard disk, and a separate one on the RAM. So if you get a RAM fault, you pull out the failing stick, take it back, and meanwhile keep running on the other (well, assuming you bought two sticks, that is!). Yes, it can be more trouble, especially if you're unlucky enough to have two components fail. But if you bought a complete system and two components failed, chances are it'd still mean two services - because they won't fail at the same time. And if you only take back (say) the stick of RAM, you avoid the risk that they'll give you a completely new system that has a fresh hard disk (forcing you to set it up all over again - happened to us, happened to lots of people), and maybe even one with additional faults. Plus, added bonus! Some components come with pretty long warranties. You could well get three or five years on a lot of things, whereas a complete system purchase is three if you're lucky, and one year if it's a cheap system.

Convenience, though - that's where buying a complete system wins hands down. Well, probably. Certainly you can just grab something out of the box and use it; although personally I enjoy knowing every teensy weensy intimate detail of my computers (and for people in the know, that was deliberate - they're not disgusting at all), so that when things happen later, I have the knowledge. But if you're wanting to get started NOW, then buy a complete system. It took me a good day to set up out of components, although I could knock that down a good bit if I didn't keep breaking off to react to Threshold!