Buying a PC, need some tips

I am posting this because I could not find any gaming PC at $1000 that is worth anything even close to $1000. (if you thought apple tax was bad, it gets even worst with prebuilt gaming PC's)

(how the hell can they justify charging $1000 and giving a mid range CPU, a crappy GT545 or a radeon 6770, 8GB of RAM and only 1TB of storage. Unless the motherboard is made out of solid gold, I cant see where that price is coming from)

Keep in mind that if you are not good at building PC's then you will need to buy one that comes with a good power supply. If you go with a cheap non gaming system and get stuck with a crappy 300 watt power supply then your next upgrade will have to also include a new power supply at which point you have already done half of the work needed to build a computer.

I know you would rather buy and are don't really want to change, (if you were to spend like 20 minutes learning about or taking apart an old system, then you would be able to use that knowledge to build almost any other system (computers are not as complicated to build as they were in the 80's)

Builging a PC is really not that hard, if you have played a nintendo, or SNES, or gammeboy, or GBA, or nintendo DS, then you know how to build a computer

99% of the connections only fit in one way and are color coated and have unique shapes.

The CPU is easy to install if you can match 2 arrows

the only part that is not shape unique is the case connector, which are color coated and labeled, just match the labels and you are good to go.

Most gaming systems have the bare minimum power supply making almost all upgrade require a new power supply. they also often give you cheap motherboards, (eg most sub $1000 gaming PC's will have a cheap motherboard with 85C and a few 105C caps, 4+1 phase power (meaning don't expect to get a good overclock), very few features, poor cooling designs, very little storage compared to a custom system, very little RAM, or if they give you a decent amount like 8GB, then they will give you like DDR3 1333 memory, or DDR3 1600 with crappy timings like 10-11-10 and it would perform like cheap DDR3 1333 memory, and will not handle overclocking.

On top of all of that, the parts will have OEM tags which means that you will not have any part warranties, you will just have the overall system warranty of like 1 year, while a custom system will have RAM with a lifetime warranty, a motherboard with a 3-5 year warranty, a Hard drive with a 5 year warranty, A CPU with a 3 year warranty, A CD drive with a 2-3 year warranty, A case and fans with a 2-3 year warranty, and a power supply with a 5 year warranty. And best of all, if something fails you are not packing up the entire system and spending like 50 euro's or dollars to send it in, just to replace a part under warranty that cost like $25 (not to mention that you will be without the entire system for 2-3 weeks, while with a custom system, you replace the broken part and RMA it, then if you want, you can sell the RMA part to recoup some of your money, or just keep it as a spare.

If you truly cant take the time to build, then just go with a gaming system that list the motherboard model and has at least a 600 watt power supply so you know you can upgrade with out having to replace half of the system.

If anything, at least find an older system in the trash or something that you can take apart and put back t0ogether to learn more about how they are built.