ok ok here's the thing. On my time here on earth i have played both sides. and I have seen both sides change my first pc outside of a BBC micro was an Amstrad 1512. back then building yourself wasn't really a thing. as most things like the ZX81 and the commodore 64 were all prebuilt systems. even the Amstrad 1512 was kinda all in one. the monitor was custom built to slot into the base unit. but when it was time to upgrade that thing to something that could run something a little bit more powerful than Gem desktop. that was when i found that you could make your own type of pc's well with a few yeas gap from there you could buy components on the cheap. well I say buy, there were places you could find things like mem sims. they were just sitting there inside the schools computers. any way however you got it. components and parts were cheap. all you needed was case, PSU, Motherboard, CPU, HDD, Ram Simms, some floppy drives and a small round lithium battery to power the bios. create a boot disk to set your sound card settings to hi mem and your golden to run any games from MSDOS. much cheaper than buying from stores and the store assistances didnt have a clue about the computers they were selling. yet alone how to load high mem from a bootup. but as time got on the parts got more expensive and the shops got more wiser. Motherboard costs around £400, CPU£350, Graphics cards you need now are another £400 and theirs still everything else. but as stores buy everything in bulk they can get everything on the cheap. giving you a full system for less than what you would pay for all the components. they would build it for you. give you a warrantee if anything goes wrong and theirs even a partially skilled helpdesk for any questions. companies like Alien ware (Before they were bought out by dell) use to tweak and overclock your system, making sure it run at ultimate performance before you even got it. now i admit I've been out of the game for a bit and don't really know what's what any more. the only thing i understand about current day technology... is that i don't understand it. but yet im hearing people saying that its better to build their own pc's. is that really true? or would you be better off buying from the store?