Whether you build it yourself or have a computer shop build it for you, go with what in the industry is known as a "white box" computer. If you want a decent computer stay away from the major brands, they have been in such serious competition with each other that they are having to use cheaper and cheaper parts to compete with each other. If you want to build a really nice box without spending an arm and a leg these are my suggestions:
Start with a mid tower case with front usb ports and a decently large power supply - at minimum 350 watts and 400 - 500 watts is preferable. You want the case to have at least one extra cooling fan and good airflow because heat is the biggest killer of computer components.
The athlon xp 2500 is the best buy in a processor at the moment - less than $100 and it has 512k cache and a 333 mhz bus. There are a lot of good motherboards available. Personally I have always been a fan of Soyo or Asus, but Gigabyte, Abit and MSI all make good boards. Whatever brand you buy get something that supports the 333 bus, dual channel memory, has an 8x AGP slot, onboard raid (either IDE or Serial ATA - more on that later) and at least 4 pci slots. Get a matched pair of 256 meg ddr 333 memory modules to go on it for a total of 512 meg ram (unless you want to spring for a pair of 512's and have a gig of ram).
For drives I strongly recomend the Western digital JB line of drives because they are 7200 rpm, have 8 meg of cache and a 3 year warranty, something the other drive manufacturers have given up on. WD also makes a line of 10,000 rpm SATA drives that have a 5 year warranty. Whichever your chosen board supports get a pair of matching drives and set them up in a striped raid configuration, this will fantastically increase your drive data transfer speed.
For a video card the GeForce FX5200 is the best buy for the least money. If you want to spring for more the FX5600 and 5900 are better. Dont mess around with the MX line, the FX5200 is about the same price and lots better. Brand name does not matter much - all the GeForce cards perform about the same.
Other than that a dvd and a cdrw or a combo drive are nice to have - I personally think Lite-on are the best value, you might as well get a floppy - they come in very handy sometimes. Most motherboards have excellent sound on board these days so a sound card is not really an issue anymore. If you go with windows as an OS XP pro is the way to go - stay away from home - the only nice thing I will say about XP home is it is not quite as flakey as Millenium.
Adding it up roughly;
Case ~ $50
athlon xp 2500 ~ $100
decent motherboard ~ $100
pair 256 meg ddr 2700 ~ $90
pair WD JB800 80 gig drives ~ $180
GeForce FX 5200 ~$90
CDRW/DVD combo drive ~ $80
Floppy ~$10
XP Pro ~ $150
So for about $850 you have a really nice computer - Spend a couple hundred more on a decent optical mouse and keyboard, some decent speakers and a 17" monitor and you have a nice system for under $1100 bucks.
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