Since I sell "white boxes" I figured I throw in my 2 cents.

Don't give up on the custom built machines.

The machines I sell to my customers are better than any branded solution out there. I use Antec power supplies, Asus or Gigabyte mobos, Crucial or Kingston Ram. I burn them in at least 12 hours and otherwise test the heck out of them. I promote them as a high end business class machines with a fast response onsite warranty. I usually make between 120-150 bucks per machine. The trick to all that fancy stuff is that I only sold 24 machines since January. All my money comes from labor.

As for the ones that don't want to spend the money one one of my machines, I tell them I will help them in any way I can after the sale. When asked what brand I recommend, I tell them that can't in good conscience specify a name.

As for Dell, I think they are killing the business. I briefly did some Dell warranty repair work. They drive down the value of service work to the point that non skilled entry level jobs pay better. They keep driving prices down on hardware and I think quality is down too. You get a crappy restore disk, and support doesen't care about your data. They are doing the same thing to the printer market.

I was thinking about telling my sister to get a Dell so I wouldn't have to build and ship her a machine, but I could'nt bring my self to it. I still don't know what I'm going to recommend.

Support standard parts, so these things wont go away. What if all manufactures where huge companys? They would ditch standards and force junk on the market.

I dont even remember where I was going with this. I guess I dont like Dell.