Buying vs building

A friend asked me to find her for a computer or two (actually for the church). A couple of days ago I looked up parts for a midrange machine for myself, and found that it's cheaper (right now) to just go buy one, EVEN if I were to use a pirated OS on the home-built machine.

So this morning I looked up the parts for the absolute cheapest REASONABLE (not complete junk) machine I can possibly build out of new parts; it's still cheaper to just drive down to CompUSA and buy a new machine, even with paying taxes (both state and Microsoft).