There are many important cost and headache saving reasons to purchase vendor built PCs rather than building your own or hiring others to do so.
1. Warranties: When you build your own PCs you may have warranties on the individual parts. However, you will either have to replace these parts yourself or hire someone else to replace them. This can get expensive fast. In many cases the cost of labor or your time is worth equal to or more than the cost of a new machine. For example if a part called the motherboard dies, someone literally has to pull just about every component out of the case, send the board back to the manufacturer, wait for a replacement to arrive, and then hook everything back together again. Not only is this time consuming but it is nerve racking worrying about static discharges, bending pins, and reapplying thermal grease. Also let’s not forget about the time it just took to get everything back up and running…a week, two weeks, or more?
On the other hand when purchasing a vendor built PC with a good warranty, a technician could be on-site with a replacement part that day or the next day. They would do everything themselves and you would have your computer up and running that same day.
2. Ease of installation and maintenance: It is much less labor intensive and therefore cheaper to deploy operating systems and software to multiple machines of the same make and model. When computers are the same throughout an organization, complete installations can literally be stamped out simultaneously in an assembly line fashion. This is the difference between taking hours to deploy each new PC to taking minutes. If a computer gets a virus or a piece of software gets corrupted, it is a quick and easy process to get that machine back into top shape.
3. Value: In this day and age you can pay as little as $350 for vendor built computer that will perform just about any day to day business function. This $350 computer may come with a $120 operating system. When adding up the parts individually + the operating system itself, it’s actually cheaper just to buy the machine rather than build your own. Of course the $350 doesn’t include the warranty but as you can see, warranties can easily pay for themselves.
As you can see there are many advantages to buying vendor built machines. These advantages compound when keeping the models as similar as possible throughout. Warranties, ease of installation and maintenance, as well as increases in the amount of performance you can squeeze from a dollar are all factors when making this analysis.