I got very lucky with mine. I work at Circuit City, and they had the computer sitting on a shelf labelled as "defective." At CC, if someone takes a computer home, takes a sticker halfway off the front, and then brings it back, it can be labelled "DEF." In this case, it was "defective" because it was missing a gig of RAM...which obviously isn't a defect. It just basically was a PC that came from the factory with 2 gigs and now had 1. One of the CSA's brought a 1 gig stick of RAM up, we put it in the computer, and he proceeded to sell it to me "defective" for $250. This was a $1,000 Gateway...for $250.
I kept waiting for one of the bosses to come up to the counter and say "No, we can't do that, sorry." But surprisingly, it never happened, and that's that. I've had it for about 4 months now, and I'm extremely happy with it. I've modded it out and upgraded it to suit my taste, and it's a pretty fast machine.
AMD 3800X2 Dual Core
2GB Corsair DDR
Creative Soundblaster 5.1 USB
BFG 7950GTOC (OC'ed some more)
Seagate 7200 SATA 300GB
Samsung 32" LCD HDTV monitor (sort of fell in my lap at a ridiculous price from work too)
Windows XP Pro SP2
I consider myself lucky to have been in the right place at the right time in order to get the thing. I plan on transferring most of the components to a new board in a few days, as the current board doesn't support an 8800GTS. Not that I necessarily *need* to do this right now...but I really *want* to do this.