Where new computers are concerned, there are three options worth considering, that I can think of.
     Money is no object: in this unlikely event, SGI will build you a nice machine for about US$150,000. Slightly cheaper are Alienwares and HewlettPackards and Sonys.
     My budget is supplemented by what I found in the sofa: Dell, at this point, pretty well pay you to accept one of their dismal little toys, largely because AOHell, MSN, and every other TLA spamfactory available in the Milky Way are paying more per physical unit than its manufacturing cost. I think you can actually get a complete machine--CPU, DVR, monitor, et cetera--for three or four hundred bucks these days.
     I'm not afraid of technology: the classic Frankensystems Model 101. This is where you spend a couple hours crawling through a hundred different DotComs looking for boards, CPUs, drives, RAM, and so on, ultimately spending anywhere from a couple of pizzas to a thousand bucks on the required parts and shipping, get them all in one place at once, and put them together. In my case, I now have a system which equates to a four-thousand-dollar ScreamerNet matrix which cost about six hundred bucks. The only downside is that there's Some Assembly Required. Which leads directly into....
     I'm not afraid of technology, because I know Hunter: same as above, but add five bucks to the total to cover the expense of the amount of Coca-cola Hunter will ingest in the three hours it takes her to put the thing together for you.
--Gremlin

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