Horrible biased article
I've been reading TechRepublic for a long time, and I have never seen any article as horribly biased as this one. Custom built computers aren't inherently bad. You get what you pay for on both sides. Years of experience in the industry has shown me the opposite of what you're claiming.
If you build cheap crappy custom machines, you get cheap crappy custom machines. If you buy cheap crappy Dell/IBM/whatever machines, my experience has shown me that these are generally worse than the crappy custom machines. At least the custom machines don't require overpriced proprietary parts that significantly increase the total cost of ownership, and time to repair.
I build custom built computers, and they're much better quality, cheaper to own, and easier to fix than any of the brand name computers out these days. Particularly those new all in one PCs that conjour up memories of the early 90s.
