Screw 'em all, buy a Compaq. I've seen it all (10 yrs. in IT, MCSE, A+, Apple Cert, yadda, yadda) and I'm here to tell you that in my experience Gateway blows, Dell has serious quality control issues, and Compaq is the most reliable. I've had both Dells and Gateways come DOA out of the box. Dell's customer service is okay for business users but very, very spotty for consumers (I suspect that some of their front-line support is now being done in India as just recently I was "on hold" with a tech and heard Hindi in the background, but that could also just be a statistical oddity of the group I got). In any case, I cannot reccomend highly enough that you stay far, far away from the "consumer" products (e.g. Compaq Presario or Dell Dimension) of either of these three manufacturers. Pay the extra few buck, make up a sole-proprietorship for yourself and buy the "business class" (e.g. Compaq Evo and Dell OptiPlex) machines. My rationale is that they come with less bloat-ware (third party software that just cludges up the machine and get's out of date) and almost always come with XP Pro - MS Office as opposed to XP Home - MS Works (or equivalent M$ crippleware). Compaq's business class machines also usually have a 3 year warantee as opposed to the one year warantee with all the others' consumer lines. It might cost you an extra couple of hundred but I have found that it is well worth it as insurance and just plain savings of headaches. You do get what you pay for. And yes, AMD gives you more processor for the buck, and are just are reliable as Intel products. People who otherwise are drinking the Intel Kool Aide.
Without preaching about custom-building machines and sticking only to the original question posed, I've owned two Gateways and two Dells over the years. I've found that Gateway's products are pieces of *#*#*#*#.
The key thing to remember when buying a computer is that they ALWAYS become antiquated within a few months of you taking it home. It doesn't matter how much you spend. And the key thing to remember is that the cutting edge stuff has the highest premium, and as soon as the next chip comes out, today's cutting edge stuff will be dirt cheap. (That ususally measured in months, by the way) Moral? DO NOT buy anything top of the line right now. Buy exactly what was top of the line 6-9 months ago. And I think that if you have nothing at home right now (no monitor, printer, etc.), you are likely better off going with one of the super cheap package deals with all the rebates from one of the national chains. (Go ahead, flame away Purists) Personally, I don't believe in paying more than $500 for something that you'll need to replace in just a few years anyway. Think about it: would you spend $1500 on a tv or stereo that will need replacing in 3 years? Nah. I went with the way budget eMachines package last year, and I'm very happy with it. Got it for around $500, and it had an AMD 1500+ processor with an AGP slot, printer, and monitor, and Windows XP loaded. Sure I could have beaten it by spending twice the money, but I'm not editing feature films or designing highly graphic video games on my home PC. I'm basically surfing, writing, and occasionally playing games. I've had no problems. In two or three years when I get a new computer, I'll do the same thing again. PS: I don't notice any performance difference between my home PC (eMachines AMD) and my office (Dell Pentium).
"I bought Dell and it's crap. You should buy gateway." "I bought gateway and it's crap. therefore you should buy dell." That is not correct logic. One sample point is hardly enough to validate a statement. No companies in the world will make 100% defect free product. From a profitability stand point, it's not worth the cost. Defective product can damage their reputation. Companies will do enough to minimize defective products, but they don't eliminate them completely. If all you use is word processing or spreadsheet, you won't see any difference. If all you do is play games or watch porn DVD's or whatever you won't see any difference. Like I said above, multimedia performance is equal. But if you do a lot of number crunching like DSP applications using Matlab, you see big difference. Even if the performance is the same, you should buy AMD because it's cheaper.
Re: Screw 'em all, buy a Compaq. What he said. Beyond that, I've used two different Dell desktops here at work (both OptiPlex) and they've both been top-shelf. My sister has a Dell and she's had mostly good experiences with it. And if you don't know very much about computers, don't listen to these schmucks telling you to build your own. For one thing, you're not saving that much money, if any. For another thing, it's a royal pain-in-the-ass. For a third, you'll have precisely zero support if something goes wrong. For a fourth, you've probably got better things to do with your time than learning all the 10,000 things that you'd need to know. I haven't bought a full PC in more than 12 years. I've replaced the motherboard several times, the case once, hard drives and memory more times than can count. I suppose that it's still the same computer that it was 12 years ago, except for the fact that it doesn't have a single component still in it that it had 12 years ago. So I'm very much a do-it-yourselfer. I've been in this hobby for 20 years, and I derive some enjoyment from doing this sort of tinkering. But I'd never recommend it for just some regular joe who just wants a PC.
Re: Re: Screw 'em all, buy a Compaq. For everyone else: Don't let any retards fool you that assembling a computer is difficult. It is not. It's a matter of following the instruction. The best way to learn is to have somebody spend 10 minutes to show you. It took me less than an hour to to put it together for the first time without any helps. Everything just fits together logically. After you get a hang of it, you have to be a total moron to think it's difficult. The only possible challenging part is wiring the LED's and fans to the the motherboard. Even that's not difficult at all. I even put the IDE hard drive cable backward when I built one for the first time. It didn't take me long to figure it out. Nowadays vendors build them for you for free anyways, so knowing how to build your own is not an issue. How much money you save totally depends on the configuration. Sometimes you save none and sometimes you save hundreds. The chance of you saving money on "special of the week" or things on sale is very low. That's common sense. First I decide what configuration I want and then shop around to see how much money I save. I would not have built any of the my 3 computers if I didn't save at least a hundreds, which is quite significant for people in college. If you buy all the parts from a vendor, they will put it together for you for free and if you ever have any trouble just bring it back. The last custom system I bought has 2 years warranty. Since your knowledge is ancient, you should shut the **** up.
Re: Re: Re: Screw 'em all, buy a Compaq. It depends. Shop around. Sometimes you can get a dell/gateway/whatever (with tech support) for $600 (including monitor). And that's without the ISP signups. A couple years back, they offered price breaks IF you signed up for MSN or AOL or whatever. Now they'll just give you the low price.
Re: Re: Re: Screw 'em all, buy a Compaq. Uh, yeah. Did you miss the part about how I've replaced every single component in my PC at least once? I've had five motherboards, something like eight different hard drives, four different floppy drives, five different video cards, five different modems, and two different cases. I know this stuff better than you do. Trust me when I tell you that swapping out a motherboard is a royal pain-in-the-ass, but at the same time, I've never spent more than $200 at any one time while keeping my PC current. The reason why "building your own" usually doesn't save you any money is because you, Mr. Hobbyist, are buying every single part at retail price with retail markup. Dell and Gateway buys the same components at wholesale price by the hundreds, if not thousands. Building your own computer is great if you have very exacting specifications as to the components that you want in your PC, right down to the brand and model of the motherboard you want, or if you like to tinker with this stuff. But for most people, there's no point.