Don't dick people over.
Most of your business will be from word of mouth.

I've got the monitor pretty well covered with my Princeton 20.1" Widescreen LCD. My other input/output devices are a bit older but serve me well enough I'm not worried about them.

Mostly it was wondering if anyone knew a reliable company that didn't completely kill me in cost. I checked with Falcon North-West since they did my first gaming computer back in... jeez, in 1998 or so. But I don't know cost well enough to say off-hand if they were charging me $200 or $700 for the privileged of not bothering to build the system, y'know? I don't have a huge problem building it if the pre-built companies are charging the upper range of that for their services I just remember the last time I tried that I spent a good three weeks sending back janky parts and trying to get everything to work right. If three hundred bucks saves me from that... probably worth my time.

Heh. Cute.

I guess I have more money than sense because I bought my last rig from Falcon NW (and have been very happy with it). I looked at it this way, my hobby is playing video games, not building the machine that will let me play video games. I'm not a technical person, so the extra cash they charged saved me from pulling my hair out worrying if I flashed my mobo right or if I just rendered a $300 component into a silicon brick.

They build solid performing rigs, have great service, and use top quality components. Their OS install is squeaky clean and their restore disc saved my behind on at least one occassion.

Two cores is very nice; it makes the system much more responsive. It's having two CPUs running in the system, so you can be doing something compute-intensive and still have an entire CPU available for running the UI and other programs.

Four cores is a rather unnecessary luxury for most. A few games will take advantage, but very few. However, that's where things are going, so getting quadcore now should give you some headroom later, and it's only a little more expensive.

Not sure if the deal is still going on, but slickdeals.net had a thread with nice DEll XPS with the Quad core cpu, 2gb ram, Vista, 320gb hard drive, 512mb 8800gt and a Blur Ray for $1k after discounts.

I priced it 3 or 4 days and sure enough $1kish after taxes.

That's an awesome deal.

Building a PC for the first time is a cliff that any PC gamer should - needs, IMO - to jump off of, because doing so simply opens a million doors. Building a PC isn't hard, the hardest part the first time is getting over the fear that you're going to damage something. PC hardware pieces are really uncomplicated devices, as far as slapping them together goes.

You (OG_slinger) say you're not a technical person, but just as putting together a piece of furniture from IKEA doesn't require being a carpenter, physically putting together a PC doesn't require being "technical". Knowing what parts to get may require some knowledge, but as CEJ said, that part can be taken by those of us that are "technical" people.

When it gets down to it, putting the video card in the PCI-Express slot, and attaching the power button connectors to the motherboard, is the same thing as using Screws "A" with Panel "B" and connecting piece "C".

I've built so many PC's I've gotten them down to about 30 min. from boxes to ready to load OS. Some of the newer cases make it even easier to build a PC than before.. the parts literly slide in almost.

At this point the "hardest" part of a PC install is getting those stupid leads plugged in on your motherboard from you case for the Power Switch etc.. and even ASUS now bundles a litle doo-dad which makes that simpler.

And here it is:

http://slickdeals.net/?permadeal=11339

I think that with those specs, he should be able to play Crysis on everything high? Note that the page specs out 3GB, not 2Gb as stated originally! I am tempted now, too.

BTW the slickdeals.com page sez the price is quoted through EPP (Employee Purchase Program). This is a kind of a corporate discount (typically 10-15%) which Dell extends to the employees of the big companies it has a relationship with, or simply to big companies. It is interesting that they're giving it now to anyone. Sort of like "Ford employee pricing" for everyone. Things must not be going very well at Dell.

After futzing with the system... they aren't. Signing up for it seems to require a company name and employee number to access it, so unless you're lucky enough to work with a MPP company no dice on the 10% discount.

That said it might be good enough even without that, only around a hundred bucks or so more. I'm looking into it via dell's main site.

UPDATE: Yeah, after talking with a service rep the coupon is only available though EPP, which I certainly don't have. That said the initial $500 off is still there. So if I go with my credit card (skipping the suggested Dell Preferred Account because I don't like giving out my SSN willy-nilly) and just base discounts it comes to $1,216.51 total. At a guess that still seems like a pretty good deal, if not as good as the slickdeals one. Anyone?

Well I went ahead and got the dell, my thanks to everyone on this thread. My brother (who works with these a lot more than me) confirmed that Dells just use standard parts so upgrading in the future shouldn't be an issue. And it's certainly a better price than others I compared it to.

In my case it isn't so much fear as laziness. I know I can build a PC; I've built and upgraded PCs before and I don't imagine changing technology made screwing motherboards in or slotting video cards any different. That said, I... don't really want to. I like the idea of having someone to call for problems if it's within the first year, of not needing to insert Socket A into Slot D and avoiding opening a large number of boxes coming in the post.

So if/when this needs an upgrade I'll probably build my own. In my mind it's fine if I already have a case, power supply, optical drive, and so forth. But when the whole thing's a loss, like my current computer, buying everything just appeals to the lazy gamer in me.

Now to go see if Crysis is available via download and if The Witcher has patches for the American version. Again, thanks to everyone.