The fight of branded pcs vs assembled pcs will never end.
I personally feel that assembled pcs are a much better buy than branded pcs for the simple reason that they are custom built. Anything Custom built is better than a standard one.
I have a HP Pavilion desktop that I bought around four years ago for around Rs90, 000.It was a top of the line pc for its times .But a few years down the line I realized that it was getting outdated and I needed an upgrade.
I called my computer guy and he said that the tower was not capable of an upgrade because of the lack of space inside .he said that there was no place for the new graphics card and the old one was obsolete. The modem was locked into the port so there was absolutely no way any changes could be made to the structure. He suggested that I change my whole tower since branded pc towers do not support upgrades.
With an assembled pc you have all the space to upgrade in the future and add better graphics cards, modems, motherboards, cd ROMs, USB ports, serial ports etc.
The problem with assembled pcs are that unlike Macintosh computers all the internal parts are outsourced by the company, put together in one module and sold to the customer. Though there might not be visible incompatibilities, there are will be small hidden problems. These incompatibilities might even cause your computer to hang!
You get to choose the internal parts of your computer in an assembled computer and therefore minimizing incompatibilities.
Cost for assembled and branded pcs is more or less the same.
Post responses/queries at the forum nanoboard at
https://nanoboard.tripod.com