Of course, especially at bargain basement prices, you get what you pay for. We found that out the hard way in a recent fiasco with $20 soundcards here in the den. Now that Lazarus is sitting in pieces and RacerX (the tenative name for the fourth system in here) is having the same crash problems as it's predecessor. This, plus the fact that the overhead lighting in the den has a tendency to turn off and on by itself, seems to suggest that we may have some electrical problems in here. This came as shocking news (really bad pun intended) to us, that RacerX seems to be unstable as was Lazarus. Irrelevant tangents aside, these bargain basement PCs are no exception. Sure, they may be cheap now, and in the end, you pay in performance and upgradability over what you would have got even with an equivilent PC clone.
To illustrate that point, I will drag both of the currently disassembled systems in the den up. "Dads", which hasn't seen any use since Lazarus was introduced into the den, is fairly typical for a "complete" system that one would order. The video card is built into the motherboard, as it the I/O (which is actually something you'll find on almost any motherboard these days.) The case on the system is meant to have a low profile, which has the side effect of allowing room for only three expansion slots in the system. And even those are made even less upgradeable by the fact that the expansion slots are on a daughtercard that comes off the motherboard. It is unlikely that one could find a motherboard that would fit in that particular case due to the unusual sonfiguration of motherboard and expansion slots. The same holds true for Lazarus, also made by DEC (who has all but withdrawn from the desktop PC market in favor of their more powerful Alpha workstations and the VAXen which they continue to churn out...
On the other hand is Rocky. This was the first PC that we owned. Originally a typical clone 386SX/20, it has undergone numerous upgrades and swap-outs over the years, and now the only original components left of Rocky are the power supply, the case, and the floppy drive (in fact, I am not sure that the block-out bezels covering the three 5.25" drive slots are original at this point!) This goes to prove the point that your standard run-of-the-mill clone system is going to be a whole lot more useful over it's lifetime (and 2 or 3 different reincarnations, depending on just how attached to your computer you've been over the years. If you are really that attached to your system, maybe it's about time to seek professional help, or a good surgeon, depending on the nature of the attachment.) At work, my system is a Dell Optiplex Gs+, which, in concurrence with Dell's reputation, is a good quality system. The main flaw that I see with it (which, of course, becomes moot the next time that upper managment decides it would be fun to move employees all over the floor again) is the design of the case housing the components inside. The front has a weird design (a feature becoming more and more common in newer PCs, especially the types you'll see sold in any store that has the computers somewhere between the Little Debbie Snack Cakes and the tropical fish) that leads me to wonder how one could replace the floppy drive in the system were it to ever go bad. one drive bay is open to the front on this system, but is taken by the CD-ROM drive that comes in the system.
Also in newer brand name systems, the trend continues to point to more proprietary pieces, especially as everyone in the retail market tries feverishly to undercut everyone else. One extreme example of this was illustrated in Computer Source, one of the freebie computer magazines found on the reader racks you see sitting next to just about every bus stop in downtown Seattle. There was a woman who came into the author's computer shop, having a problem with a broken pin on one of their ports. The writer noted that if this system were the type of patchwork clone that the ship typically puts out, this would have been a one-banana problem, but of course, this system was a Compaq, which was so proprietary in it's architecture that to fix this simple borken pin on the COM port would require a motherboard replacement, for which Compaq would have charged over $600 (and considering that the going price for a typical clone motherboard would have been $200 or less. This is another hidden cost of brand-name PCs. When a manufacturer's proprietary pieces they put in their systems go out, these manufacturers will typically charge plenty for the replacements. As they say down there in New Orleans, "Cha-ching!"
Of course, the typical first-time PC buyer is not going to be concerned about how much of the computer is made by companies with names they can't pronounce. The fundamental problem is that by actually knowing a thing or two about computers in the first place, we're the ones left with the task of unhosing these contraptions when they decide to pull a Titanic. Wouldn't you rather have a system that you can actually get parts for in this case? If you are giving any advice to even a clueless enwbie, I would recommend steering them away from the big-name brands and right into the local screwdriver shop. Sure, it may seem a little intimidating at first, but this also makes the new user learn how to use the system to some degree.
It is in this direction that some of the larger manufacturers are turning. Many an expert PC user has looked at the configuration of a Packard Bell or an Aptiva and wondered exactly where the engineers managed to sneak the DEVICE=ducttape.sys line into the config.sys file. Now that the major cloners are moving into the field of buiilding customized PCs, one has to wonder how they'll deal with all of the interoperability issues that will inevitably pop up in their path... Maybe if these companies want to earn a little extra revenue on the side, they can build bleachers outside of their engineering facilities so the technoheads can watch them deal with this...