Planning on taking it overseas?
Honestly (and I'm a dead set hardcore geek who won't get caught owning one of these myself but they're fantastic value) you can't look past what Dell offer. Complete computer systems that are of more than adequate performance and made of pretty good bits and pieces.
Can't ask for much more? Yes.. You can.
What about technical support and long warrenty? Dell offers both these things for not much more over the base price of the PC.
I don't care what most people will tell you, good luck getting warrenty replacements on ANY part over 12 months old. I've worked in the PC parts 'industry' and suppliers here in australia basically disown the parts after 12 months. Some computer shops will be nice to you and replace parts on the spot without question.. But many will not as they're not under any oligation to do so. So basically if a part fails you will have to expect a MINIMUM of 1 week downtime if something DOES die (and they CAN and DO). This is no good if you've got kids doing assignments.
With a Dell this does not happen. If you optioned up the right package you simply call them and when they determine over the phone there's a problem they will dispatch a tech to come out and get it going again. Your PC will usually be alive again within the next 2 days (they say 24 hours but realistically I'd say 48hrs).
Thats really their main selling point - and its a bloody good important one. Look into it.
www.dell.com.au
And if you watch carefully everynow and again there's some fantastic deals. Dell give away all sorts of upgrades every so often for absolutely nothing. Recently I set up some family friends with a VERY powerful system and dell gave us a 21" widescreen LCD and an inkjet printer for $5 extra. Yes, $5 extra. Along with that they also had a free upgrade to 1GB of ram at the time. I was shocked to put it simply as I could not have put a system together like that at the price they got it for with retail hardware pricings (and I definately could not have offered the 3 year warrenty and tech support dell offered for only $99).
I know some hardcore computer jocks will disagree with me but they're probably young and innocent - no offense to them. Not been exposed to the real world and how annoying it is when you're not the most computer savvy person in the world and you can't troubleshoot driver issues as easily as they can pick their nose!
Cheers
