"Hell Toupee" wrote in message ...


I found a local computer
shop that's been in business for 25 years and they built a new machine
with impressive performance for half what I paid for DELL's flagship
model three years ago--another lesson learned.

I'm glad you learned it. I build my own, so I don't shop for
off-the-shelf desktop pcs for myself.

I'm okay with installing drives or a new video card, or a power supply on
one occasion, but that's about as far as I want to push my ignorance. I
know people who build PCs for fun and profit, but even they run into
irritating conflicts that are a pain to troubleshoot, so I'd just as soon
pay someone to do that part.

OTOH, they make sense for a significant proportion of the home user
market - those people who pretty much just surf the web, do email, do a
little bit of word processing and other low-level tasks. Even so, there
are far, far better buys on the market than Dells.

Sure, plug it in and use it is what those folks want. But of course part of
what they're paying for is DELL's (or HP, or Sony) gazillion dollar annual
marketing budget. The DELL was the first name-brand computer I ever bought,
all the others were built for me by guys who knew what they were doing--I
guess it was a mistake to break with that approach.