brand name system upgradability

Hi, I've got the opportunity to purchase a brand-name system at a heavily discounted price through my company, however my companies' retailer is fairly clueless about things such as the number of internal drive bays, pci slots, etc. I'm currently looking at the Dell Inspiron 545 MT and Acer Aspire X1800. Both of these systems have the main barebones components I need (mainly, intel q8200 cpu and 4gb ddr2 RAM), which will end up being cheaper than just the cpu, mobo and ram for a custom-built rig. However, I'm used to using 4 hard drives, having a couple of pci slots, plenty of drive bays... does anyone know if the motherboard specs for these systems are generally made public, or if they're only built to take the components they ship with (e.g 1 hard drive and one burner = only 2 sata connectors on the motherboard)?

Say hello to:

bottom-bin CPU's, no solid state caps in all likelihood, no extra sata connectors in all likelihood, horrible bios with very few options. No overclocking.

I would never buy a PC unless I at least opened it and made sure I was happy with the hardware

I can't speak for the Acer, dunno anything about those, but...

From what I can find on the Inspiron 545, it appears to have a PCIe X16, a PCIe X1, two PCI, and four SATA ports on board (of which two would be used for the optical drive and HD). Usually Dell minitowers have one free 5.25" bay and one free 3.5" bay, so that would allow potentially three hard drives in total, and if you want to add a PCIe x1 SATA card, there's probably room to cram an additional hard drive or two in the case, if you get crafty with the mounting.

As far as upgradability, you have a certain amount of leeway. You'd want to upgrade the PSU if you put much of a video card in there... that's the main limitation.

If you see my sig.. I got that system heavily discounted and only liked it 4yrs ago when it was new. Upgrading is horrible. As trash ocnoob said.. locked bios leaves you out of luck for any OC unless you want to try to use the software FSB overclocking (not a good idea), the power supplies are rated to MAYBE 350-400w, and theres no telling if you can even push it that high.. mobos are usually no-name, and you couldnt find a bios for them if you wanted to.

Unless the system is dirt cheap, you'd be better off trying to build something yourself.