I don't think it is neccessarily cheaper to build your own. With all the sales going on, especially on black Friday, those offerings are hard to beat. The advantage, if you build it yourself, is that you can get the mix of components that you like. And in the process of building it you aquire knowledge that may help you later to troubleshoot problems. But if you consider the components you need to buy, the monitor and the software, you will probably be spending more money building it yourself.
PS: I would appreciate if you put a proper location into your profile. With the BS you put in, I don't even know whether you are in the US and know what "black Friday" is.

I helped my neighbor shop for and assemble his pc after he ordered all the parts off newegg.com. I think its better that way cause you get to choose your exact specs and you can make your comp as good as you want it to be. Granted, it costs more money and time, and you have to know what your doing, in the end, you get a better computer (if all of your stuff is compatible).

Once we finished my friends PC, it ran circles around anything id ever seen. So I think when you build it yourself, you can make the way you want it, so it gives you better results.

Gmanlink, I never stay in line. I buy the stuff a week earlier and when it goes on sale on black Friday I get the difference refunded - the store managers usually know what goes on sale. You have to make friends with them. That's how I e.g. got a HP with AMD 4800+, 3GB of RAM, a 350GB Sata, Vista Premium and a 22inch HP monitor - the whole package for $480. Try to build that - the monitor alone is $300 to $350. And Btw (since you mention quads), my Dell Q6600 with 4GB's is no bit faster than the HP - at least not for what I am doing. I attribute that to the slower FSB on the Intel.

It's DDR2. But not all of the 4GB's are used by the 32bit Vista - only 3.2GB's at full load (which I really have not had yet).

You mean for a quad? I have seen them between $500 and $600 depending on the CPU and the Graphics. But they can go up to over $1000 - and this is without the monitor (figure another $250 to $350 for a 22 inch). Next time I would get a Phenom (AMD) because of the faster FSB. For normal operation I think that would be an advantage. Here is an example http://www.circuitcity.com/ccd.....keycode=85

In the long run, when you think about the upcoming Windows7, a quad is probably better. That's why I bought mine in that configuration. But with vanilla Vista a duo is quite alright. E.g. an AMD 5600+ should do a nice job (not the 6000+ - runs too hot). Advantage is that they are a lot cheaper than the new quads. As far as disks go, I got 2x250GB. I use the second disk for my restore points (with Ghost14). But even the 250GB's on the OS disk I will probably never all use. Now graphics is a completely different story. If you do gaming with modern games, then you better get an expensive graphics. But for normal picture, movie, etc., a low end card is quite alright. I have an ATI Radeon HD 2400 Pro with 250 MB's. That does a nice job although the shader could be a little better. I may have to try a different setting. On my HP I have an on board Nvidea. That works fine too.

windows 7 probs. wont be out for a while so nobody is really sure how it will turn out yet but most likely it will be better in it's own ways just like vista is to xp.

jack is right. We really do not know a lot about Windows7 yet. But from a couple of architecture presentations I have seen, it looks very exciting. They seem to have solved the legacy problem from which Vista suffers so much and hopefully it will be a much cleaner system than what we have seen recently.

Jack7h3r1pp3r is right, we cant know how it will be because they havent released a beta version to the public, so no one have tried it. Also, i dont get why people think vista is so much worse than xp since vista is a more secure, cooler looking version of xp. other than that, they are the same