Well, i wouldnt buy anything that Dell is involved in.
I agree with both sharkfood and iss, sharkfood for pointing out the disposable issue. If you are only spending $400 then fine, you could even go for a Dell. And even though i dont like Dell myself iss has pointed out that even Dell is moving away from proprietary mobos and power supplies, but i just wouldnt trust them on a $1500 pc purchase. There are so many other pc vendors out there. Notice i dont call them pc mfgrs as they arent mfgrs, Dell and Alienware and all the rest of them are only vendor, they dont manufacture anything, they just put parts together and put their name on the case sorta thing. They actually put their name behind the whole pc. When the name is good thats fine but when its bad, well....
But if you are spending $1,500 i suggest you either build your own with our help, which is not hard to do at all, or buy from anyone but Dell or Alienware. The reason i say that is in the $1,500 that would leave Dell out, they are only good for the $300 to $400 units already described. And anything that Alienware has you can put together yourself for less and you can buy under another name for less.
So build your own or go for a company with a good name, there are many many good pc vendors out there. Its hard for me to come up with names as i dont buy them i build them, but there are lots of decent vendors out there.
Go to pcmag and\or pcworld and see their lists of pc vendors. They do comparisons every month and if you check thru a few months worth of reports you will come up with a few pc vendors. There are names like polywell, micro-express, sys technology, etc. All these vendors have to work harder to sell systems as they dont have the brand name that Dell, Compaq, HP, for instance, have. But i wouldnt touch a Dell, Compaq, HP or Acer. Acer now are riveting the backs of the cases so you cant get one of the side panels off unless you want to drill out the rivet!! Yes, you can live with this as is, but i sure wouldnt!!
Still, i suggest you build your own. You can get a better retail mobo instead of a stripped down mobo, you can buy a seagate hard drive with a 5 yr warranty instead of a maxtor with a 1 yr warranty, and i could go on and on.
Better to build your own or even get all the parts yourself and a pc shop near you will put it together for you for $100 or less!! Now there is a real good option not mentioned yet!! Might be best for you if you dont wanna try and do it yourself.
One more piece of hopefully usefull advice. If relying on a friend to build one for you, make darn sure hes not just full of hot air. Ask him or her to name people that you can check with to see if they are happy with the pc he or she built for them. If they cant do that, keep them for a friend but get someone else to build your pc! And like i said, if you have to, you can get a pc shop to build one for you, we can help you out with getting all the parts!
One last bit of advice. Most people spend way more on the pc itself than they need or should and then dont have any left over for goodies like digital cameras and other fun, neat stuff!! In my opinion all you need is a high end pentium 3 to go on the net, do word processing, email, forums like this, and so on. For instance, even onboard video is fine for all pcs except gaming.
Someone will shoot me down for this but i stand firm. Now you cant go out and buy a P3 pc, but its the point i am making that is valid. You DONT have to go out and spend $1,500 thats for sure. And leave some bucks left over for that digital camera or mp3 player and the other goodies that will enhance your pc experience!! And dont forget that you will want a decent printer or maybe an all in one printer\scanner\copier as there are some decent all in ones out there. And dont forget that cool software you might want, cant just talk about a pc, there are these other costs too.
I know i am gonna get hammered for some of the stuff i said, so just consider this is just my opinion, take it for what you think its worth. However, i do stand beside what i said, its my belief.
