[sdtPikachu]

You can pick up CD drives dirt cheap these days; a good 40x shouldn't cost you whatever the equivalent of 40 quid is.

You will need a floppy. Despite them being totally obsolete and utterly utterly crap, there's still a lot of essential system stuff that needs floppies (boot disks, drivers, that kinda bollocks).

Go with an Athlon XP, but there is little point in buying the top of the range model - it's best to buy one down from that. Games don't se much CPU power these days, they are just very demanding of the graphics card.

Shell out on a good mobo, and upgrading will be a cinch (namely make sure it has enough PCI slots, IDE channels, USB ports, etc).

If you're planning on buying an expensive case, don't do it yet - just buy a cheap crappy one. If you're planning on getting a so-so case, buy a decent steel one. If you can, have a fiddle with it to see how easy it is to remove/replace things. Also it's a good idea to find a case with a hard drive cage that has fans blowing over it; keeping your hard drives cool substanially improves their lifetime and reliability.

MAKE SURE YOU READ UP ON HOW TO FIT A HEATSINK BEFORE YOU EVEN ATTEMP TO DO SO! This is the hardest part of making a comp - botch it up, and you could fry or even crush your CPU - a very expensive mistake.

Buy a heatsink that is overspecced for your comp - that is, if your processor runs at 1.8 GHz, buy a heatisnk that's certified for at least 2 GHz and so on. This will run your chip cooler, and improve it's life and performance.

If you want, I could have a shufty throuigh the online resellers up there and put together a trial compuetr for you to peruse.