Pre-made systems have come a looooong way since I last looked at one. I'm almost ashamed to admit that I'll consider a Dell in the future... Only if I can get the AMD core though.

Dells are much better than ones in past and a good value but still dont hold a candle to the performance of a home built system from someone who knows what they are doing and buy top of the line components. For a web surfer general purpose system dell is good. Once you get into thier high end XPS systems you are better off building your own.