It has changed - You get a lot more for yor money now and I think building your own/ upgrading has become less attractive than it was then. On top of what Mark Clark has said, if you have an older PC you would probably be looking at a new motherboard to take a newer processor, yor old memory may well be useless as it's the wrong type for the new motherboard and you may need a higher wattage power supply.

I think it was last year when I compared the cost of buying a PC to building a similar spec by purchasing components from the same company. It would have cost more in components than the ready made machine.

I ordered the replacement for the last component in the P133 I mentioned today - the monitor expired. As it turned out, I upgraded it not long after replying to this thread. The right deal came my way and I fitted some bits - it became an AMD K2 500 for around £200 - a lot cheaper than I could have bought something similar for at the time. If it hadn't been for a violent storm which zapped a number of computers round here, including mine, I'd probably still be running it but when repairing the damage, I upgraded again - Athlone 1Ghz now.

Re software, XP and thier anti piracy policy (as far as I understand it certain repairs or upgrades would need a phonecall to MS to try to persuade them you were not trying to install on another machine...) became the point where I decided no new MS products.

I don't think Linux is quite "there" yet for the majority of home users but it will get there in time and there is some fantastic FREE software around.

One worry I heard about regarding free software was mentioned in the abc list - something called DRM. I do not know the facts but it was suggested that a more cynical reason for the mechanism as proposed is to make running free open source software more difficult. It seemed to be felt that some of the big boys are scared that in some cases, this type of software outperfoms the commercial stuff.

Jon