Why I Don't DIY (Anymore)

Ed Bott's post at ZDNet about the counterproductivity of whining about Vista (and its follow-up) got me thinking about something I've been asked about a number of times.  If I'm concerned with getting the best possible PC for my money, why don't I build one myself instead of relying on a manufacturer?

This whole topic got sparked off when I mentioned to a friend that I had bought an Alienware machine (which I have been very happy with overall) instead of going the white-box route.  Out came the justifications for going the DIY route: Oh, but you could save a lot of money; it's better if you build it yourself; you know exactly what you're getting that way; etc.

Well, I've gone the DIY route myself before, and it proved to be no better than going the pre-built route.  In fact, it was a good deal worse for a variety of reasons.

1. Warranties.  When I buy a computer, I'd like to have at least some guarantee that the machine I get will last me for the next few years.  If I buy a pre-build, I have some degree of assurance for that in the form of a warranty.  If I cobble my own machine together, it's that much harder to deal with things if any one piece fails, because then I'm at the mercy of many different hardware makers, not just one.
2. Integration.  It took four tries before I finally got memory that worked properly with my original DIY machine.  And this was after matching specs repeatedly; I wasn't just buying memory blindly.  I spent two weeks playing Musical DIMMs when I should have been working.  With a pre-integrated PC, what comes out of the box has a far better chance of working out of the box than something you put together yourself, and it's almost always possible to swap things out after the fact, anyway.
3. Hassle.  I'm no longer enamored of the romance of building and tweaking a system on my own.  And as Ed suggested in his articles above, tweaking is something of a 99th percentile-of-performance sort of thing: the gains you get from doing so are incremental and not overwhelming.  (The single biggest performance gain I got out of my PC was by changing video cards, which I doubt counts as a "tweak" per se.)  It is simply not worth the trouble, and if you need to be constantly tweaking to make your system run well, then either there's something fundamentally wrong with the system or there's something wrong with your expectations.

Hm... By all rights, I should be a Mac user.  And at some point, I probably will add a Mac to my hardware arsenal, if only for the sake of familiarity.

Still, when it comes to the PC, I'd rather spend a little extra money to get something that I know will work tolerably well out of the box now.  I don't buy PCs to impress my friends; I buy them to get work done.