My personal experience is that I have avoided eMachines. Best Buy will tell you "They are made by Gateway." That is not true. Gateway OWNS eMachine, but they are still their own company. Gateway does NOT build eMachines. I worked for Gateway during that acquisition and the plan was to buy a company that already had a retail store presence, then leverage the retail stores by saying "Okay now that we own eMachine, we will put Gateway on the shelf next to them or you will get neither." That was all with an eye on closing the Gateway retail stores. (Which resulted in me and a lot of people losing out jobs.) Try to reach eMachine tech support sometime.

I will always steer people toward Dell. I own 5 Dell's right now and in the rare occasions I have needed tech support they were very good.

The only downside of a kit is that YOU are tech support for a kit computer, and the parts typically have 90 days warranty vs one year. I used to build too, and still would if I needed a computer for a specific application, like a gaming system would have THE latest and greatest state of the art video card at the time of build, etc.... and it's not a bad way to go. I typically find that buying pieces parts and assembling runs me about 30% more than buying a name brand computer. And when you factor in that if you order your case from here, your mobo from there, your RAM from the other... you are paying $100 in shipping.

But again, it is not a bad way to go IF you need anything special in the computer.