Alright! I was wondering when when my fellow PC nerds would pipe up.
To be honest I haven't actually built myself a computer since 2002. This is back in the IDE days (no serial HDs yet!), in the AGP video card days (PCIExpress was just barely coming on the scene), in the Pentium 4 heyday, and when (if any of you even remember this) Rambus RAM was the best, but most expensive, RAM you could get and 512 MB of it was a lot and 1GB of it was hardly thought of.
That PC is still running for me well now seven years later. The only upgrade I made was to get the best AGP video card that will ever be made. With that, it played BioShock at about 20 FPS, if that. I also desperately looked to upgrade the RAM. Nowadays Windows XP and the first program will eat up almost 512MB by themselves. But Rambus soon after I bought the PC went kaput, so the maximum RAM I could possibly get is 1 GB, but it's very rare and so costs around $300-$400 to get it. Rip. Off.
Anyway, when I bought that PC, I went for a computer that would last me a long time, and so spent about $1700 I believe. In its day, it played games
excellently. Now, it has trouble with TF2.
So... now that I write this, I guess you guys are right. That PC lasted me seven years. If you buy one several tiers down, it ought to play games at the moment decently, and last around 3 years.
The biggest lesson I learned is to make sure your rig is easily upgradeable. Like Moogle said, there's no reason to get the 2TB hard drive now, when a year or two from now when you actually need that much space, the price will be cut in half. You can save money now, and just upgrade later when your PC starts to slow down/run out of space for much cheaper.
Going with the new, popular standards is really important as well. If I bought a computer now, I would get a motherboard that accepts the newest RAM type and the newest CPU socket, since in the future all the new parts will be using those and the old versions will be slowly phased out. The last situation you want to be in is when you can find the super fast version of everything for really cheap, but you have to buy the expensive but
much slower version just because no one manufactures them any more....