Dont build PC's... those PC companies put cheap motherboard and cheap harddrive and cheap RAM's but charge you the price of all the quality hardware (so they make money...) a good quality motherboard (asus/abit seems good, I'd avoid those nameless cheap brands like MSI and PCware (AKA Alton)), Athalons or PIII (I recommend Athalon, they seem to beat even Pentium 4's), a 30 gig IBM Deskstar (supposly the best harddrive out there), Geforce 2's, CD burners and 256 megs of ram (Muskin makes the best, Micron and Kingston is good as well) and a DVD drive shouldnt run more than about 1000 dollars... forget about those Dell/Gateway 2k 1000 dollar PC with monitors.... 9 times out of 10 they give you cheap 15 inch monitor and probably makes your eyes tired, or doesnt have much in ways of refresh rate and resolution... if you got an old PC that is ATX form factor you dont even need the case, just empty the case and put in new hardware (If you use athalons MAKE SURE you got at least 300 W powersupply or else you will get lots of crashes...) Motherboard dont sound like much but they are the most important part of your computer.... theres nothing in your comp that doesnt go through the motherboard so get a good one, your CPU comes second, memory believe it or not has A LOT to do with the stability of your system! Since crash is really a memory error you can see why crappy RAM causes alot of crash (PC companies always use cheap RAM... if not they would have to up the price) RAM's today are so cheap cost shouldnt even be an issue. Your harddrive is the biggest bottleneck in your system, since it is thee slowest, get a good one as well... For those who doesnt know how to build a system its not that hard... try asking a computer shop if you can watch them repair computers.. if you can put together an AR-15 out of spare parts you can build a system... That way you wont have to subjectigate your computers under gunfire...