Buy decent-brand stuff, no PC Chips motherboards, however inexpensive they seem. Do you need a decent graphics card? If you're going to be gaming/CADing then yes, if not then anything will do, so you can certainly save some money there. No need to spend more than £50, you might even be fine with onboard graphics... For multi-tasking, you want an AMD X2 CPU, probably. Dual core and they will allow you to do twice as many things at one (Eg Rip a DVD and encode some video or something). Although to speed up video encoding, a Pentium may be better. There's probably not much in it - The AMD is nearly as fast as a Pentium in these things now anyway. I would go for an AMD X2 4200+. I would say large hard drives are important. If you want to be really clever, get a Western Digital Raptor 72GB to put Windows and all your programs on (they are very fast), and then get another 300GB (or two) drive to put all the other crap on (videos, files etc). There's probably no need to worry about RAID, the Raptor will be faster. Go for 2Gb RAM to be a pimp. More is stupid. 1Gb is probably enough for most people at the moment, but if you're doing a lot of editing you might see the difference. I've gotta go now