For a little over 3 grand I just upgraded to a pretty slick machine, with most of the bells and whistles apart from a printer (I retained my printer, which was a pretty new laser).
Pentuim 1111 2gig flies along and runs extremely cool if you can afford it, the 1.8 gig is around 100 bux cheaper.
If you haven't experienced dm (dual memory) ram and can afford it, it's blistering compared with sdram. It actually has dual chips and runs at a bus speed of 800!!
This price got me a 19" monitor, cd burner. 40gig hd and a whacky sound card and surround speakers with inbuilt amplifier. 512 of dm ram makes it absolutely fly.
I originally installed windows xp, but unfortunately at the moment it won't run my satellite card and telstra are not rushing to update the software (the USA have already updated). Win xp was fine (if you don't mind the gui designed for a 5yo.
I had to change to Win2000 pro, which unfortunately has beem more than troublesome. I was experiencing total freezes, usually when the pd was idle for 5 minutes. When I done an auto update (which 2000 pro prompts you to do) I lost my IE and Outlook express and had to reinstall, not a short task with 2000.
However, I've spoken to a lot of gurus on the net who swear by it, so I guess it's a case of choosing the right updates. Unfortunally most windows updates fix around 80,000 bugs and create another 200,000!
I've made this machine squeal, with the processor light continually on and the hard drive rumbling for like half an hour and the processor has not risen a degree in temp (it actually drops slightly as the two heat sinks go up a gear)
As for the pricing of seperate componants, computors are allowed to be written down within a year anhway, with the exception of the monitor (longer life span). You'd have to have a smart accountant to buy a monitor in <$300 parts. Same applies to the printer.
