burty117 said:
compdata said:
Tekkaraiden said:
I'm curious why the custom built system didn't have an operating system included.
I agree and think bot including one was a mistake. Oem licences are not that expensive but the OS and the systemlevel warentee are often a major decisionmaking point to me. In general though I agree that for higher end rigs it starts to make sense to build yourself as the "options" are what kills you on the prebuilt computers. However for the entry to mid level machines you can early beat a prebuilt.
Because Dell, HP etc... don't offer their computers with anything else other than Windows, as if you built the machine, you could put OSX on (although it would be difficult) Linux Distro or if your building a PC, the chances of you having a copy somewhere of windows is fairly high.
Anyway... I built a computer back in 2006 i think it was? back when AMD athlon X2's were ruling the roost until the Core2Duo's came out. I am stilling using my AMD to this day in my Gaming Rig, still runs Crysis due to the fact I can upgrade parts.
I would never recommend a pre-built system because almost all components are of inferior quality,
Motherboard is usually rubbish and BIOS is rubbish, Heatsink is usually bog standard and don't even get me started on the PSU's Dell use! Had a friend who's got a dell and wanted me to upgrade the graphics card so they can actually play games but in doing so we'd be way over the ammount of power the PSU supplied so I had to get him to buy a new PSU as well, even worse, When I call Dell about it they told me and I quote "Some of our systems are powered slightly differently compared to standard parts you can get in a shop, for example your model is powered backwards, you know, as in the power is sent in the opposite direction compared to a standard computer setup"
He then went on to say how it is superior to "component longativity" Meanwhile I put him on hold and was laughing my little ribs off! Then when he shut up I said i'm replacing the PSU anyway because he just told me utter "Sh*t" he then told me not to swear and that it would invalidate the warrenty and he was "100% certain" the computer would explode when I did it, So i did and guess what??
It worked! this was 2 years ago and it still runs Mass effect 2 and everything else fine!
So now I refuse to actually purchase dell desktops ever again, don't mind their laptops but desktops, always build, once you have you'll never look back!