I can't even finish reading the first post, I feel sorry for you Acadia :(

I build every comp I ever owned, aside fro the first 2 that were pre pentium ;p 8088 and 286 i think, damn old times!

my parents bought a dell cuz my mom didn't want me to touch her comp, cuz she thinks she smarter than me even though she cant find the tv guide channel even though theres a "tv guide" button on the remote.........ANYWAYS, so ofcourse she gets a virus on her comp, and stuff quits working (dell tech thought virus, but couldve been uneducated clicking in places ;p) and after 3 hours of her yelling at them for a cd to reformat the comp, they told her about the restore feature lol then they dont bother to mention setting up the stuff so she couldnt use the internet, but o well. 

THEN she finally gets tired of dell, and gives me 5 minutes to fix it, all works fine right? then she uses it and says it doesnt work, yelling at me now o.0 blah blah blah she was right not to let me touch it blah blah......so i go look at it AGAIN, works fine, um ok? and i tell her to show me when doesnt work, and it's cuz she was using msn.com for a search engine, and site was down for some reason, so ofcourse she thinks her comp doesn't work! 

after that, i think i prefer the dell guys, lol

but anyways, i always build my comps, well worth it to me, but then again i'm probably more of a gamer, artist just a hobby, so ofcourse i need to know my comp ;p