Whooo-wee. It's been four years since I've bought a computer. (Thanks to Josh for the free laptop, and Yvonne for the broken PC, which kept me from buying a full system.) Around '05 I got a cheapie Compaq and a Mini Mac to do web dev stuff, that supplanted a really nice Athlon 64 system that was my main box.

The new computer is a midrange Athlon II x4, the $99 quad. It's in a Gigabye mainboard with a bunch of connnectors. Got an Antec power supply with the "green" certification, and a terabyte hard drive. 4 gigs of DDR3 RAM, g.skill brand. It's a total "overclocker" system, but will be run at stock speeds. The case is from a used, very old Celeron. The mess cost around $475.

Nowadays, it does not make much sense to buy parts and build a PC. The prebuilt ones seem to be a much better deal, especially when they're bundled with monitors. You get all this extra stuff, like mice, keyboards, and speakers. You also get Windows, which I didn't get. Laptops sell for $500 nowadays, and a comparable Dell desktop costs $500 to $550.

It's mostly an aesthetic decision at this point - it just fees nicer to put it together, with just the right mix of CPU, memory, and disk. I tend to skimp on the CPU and boost the memory and disk, and totally ignore graphics.