Tweaky, if you really want a desktop replacement. Check out Sagers as well.
http://www.xoticpc.com/ has been around for a while, and what companies like these do is use Acer, Sager, ASUS, MSI etc chassis and then OEM parts from top companies for the optional parts outside of the motherboard. You will get much higher quality parts. There is a good chance you can find some possible build combinations through places like xotic that you just will not find through big box brands as well.
One of the issues with companies like Dell & HP is they are very similar to Walmart in the way they batch order things like Hard drives and other parts that are optional when building a PC through a website.
To explain that, what Walmart does is tell the company they want X number of product (usually a massive order), but they want it for X price due to the mass order. Usually this price is so low those companies have reduce the build quality of their parts in order to match the price point.
Dell is one of the worst when it comes to this IMO. Over almost 20 years I've almost never met anyone who hasn't had major issues with their dell.
On the other hand I had a Sager 19" gaming laptop that I drug through two deployments to Iraq and Afghanistan (it was a 4,000$ build), and never had a problem with it. The damn thing would take most desktop CPUs lol.
Right now I have a 13" Sager that has two 500GB SSD hard drives in RAID 0, Sound Blaster Cinema 2, Nvidia Graphics, and 16GB of ram lol. The thing is a little brick, but it's still easy to port around. It's just an example of what kind of weirdness you can put together using brands like that. My wife really didn't care about thin and light, but wanted small and powerful when we got it.
Xotic isn't really a place to build a budget machine, but you do get a lot for your money in my experience. Oh, and they don't load your PC with nearly as much bull crap that you have to remove. They have really great and personal customer service as well.
"are you sure you're not a righty?"
