Any advice would be much appreciated, though sorry if this is a bit OT.
Consider what you'd like, then consider what you *need*. Buying state of the art computer equipment is a fast and simple way to burn a lot of money. It'll be obsolete and worth half of what you paid for it before you get it sorted well enough to really use it. When building a new box for general use, I always look at components which are a year to 18 months out of date. They are easy to get hold of brand new (i.e. with warranty), very cheap to buy and well supported by modern software. The money saved by buying less than state of the art components can be spent on things which will really make a difference long term - like a gig of memory, or a fatter internet pipe. -- "...our desktop is falling behind stability-wise and feature wise to KDE ...when I went to Mexico in December to the facility where we launched gnome, they had all switched to KDE3." - Miguel de Icaza, March 2003