[SnoEclipse]

$250-300 on a 22 or 24 inch monitor, reserve another $200 for a decent case, fans, and 600 watt+ power supply.

Keyboards and mice are cheap. If you really need new ones $50- should be enough.

Dual-layer DVD/RW drives are $30- each. Don't bother with a Blue-Ray drive, those things are still over $300-.

Pick up an ATi 48xx graphics card.

1Tb drives are $100 each. For that same $100 you could probably get a pair of 500Gb drives which you can then mirror for safety/performance.

Now with the left over, buy as much cpu/ram/mobo as you can. 3 Gig dual or even quad core chips are running about $200 these days. Ram is always on sale for around $15- per gigabyte. I'm partial to Intel mini-ATX mobos, rock solid, etc, etc.

Buy at Microcenter and/or General Nanosystems. At General Nano you can have them work up a quote for you based on a few parameters:

Preferred monitor size
Preferred video card
Preferred cpu
4 Gb ram

Just figure out those 4 details and let them work up the quotes. GNS can do same day assembly and delivery.......