<human>: Give me the gist of the text in a nutshell

I'll try to make this short: I wanted a desktop with a giant set of hard drives for media storage/editing that I could potentially use for gaming should I, you know, accidentally start gaming again. Saw an ad for a custom-built gaming PC on Craigslist and it looked great - not an impossible deal, but a good one (I priced the components and they'd be around $1200 new, this is 800).

One problem - on the rare occasions I buy something on CL, I follow the "cash in public places" rule. This is a desktop, so I think I'll end up going to this guy's house. I don't especially want to, but I don't see an alternative; the computer is gigantic. I'm not especially attractive, but I am female and going somewhere new and weird by myself with large amounts of cash is disconcerting.

Other problem: Gaming machines, and custom-built ones especially, are prone to asploding for various reasons I will ascribe mostly to voodoo. I know I can run msinfo32.exe to make sure that the components listed are actually the ones in the computer, and I know the ones that are listed are quite nice. But other than that I have no idea what to look/test for to help ascertain if the system will die in a week, and all the internet guides seem designed to help absolute novices. Right now my list is like "make sure it doesn't run too hot, make sure the hard drives don't make clunky noises, and hope this guy is better at cable organization than you are." Surely there has to be more.

I have no reason to believe this guy is a scammy scammer - he seems pretty upfront (if somewhat laconic) in his emails, but I want to be safe - or, barring that, at least safe-ish.
<bot>: Meeting a guy tomorrow (probably at his place) to buy a custom gaming desktop. Trying not to get robbed/scammed. Help is appreciated!