I recently put a phatty window & blue light into my case. The last thing I bought was a 512MB stick of DDR. Next month, Ive got some money to burn ($300 or so), so what should I buy next? Here’s what I’ve got already:
P4 2Ghz
640 MB RAM
80 GB HD
16x16x32 CDRW
Optical Mouse
MS Natural Keyboard
17in Monitor
ATI Radeon 9000, 128MB
Epson C62 printer
Just looking for some ideas.
DVD burner, always a good choice. Or maybe some peripherals? Like a scanner or digital camera? A few games that you really want?
How about a scanner? I’ve been happy with my HP model (2200).
Sell your monitor and use that towards the purchase of a nice Trinitron 19 inch monitor.
17 inches is far too restrictive for anything other than e-mail.
More RAM and DVD.
(Not knowing the specs on your HD)
I recently purchased a Western Digital “Caviar” series HD to use with high-end games. The 8MB cache of the Caviar gave me a significant performance boost over my 2MB cache HD (both are 7200 rpm).
Chrome wheels.
Fat tires.
And bolt a carburetor to the top of of the CPU.
That’s screen one. Now get cards and monitors for screens two and three.
Then, since that will have used up a lot of your slots, get a breakout box to give you extra card slots.
The first of which you can fill with a fast-and-wide SCSI card. Which you’ll need for your RAID system. RAID level 1 is quite cool. If one drive fails, everything got written to the second drive (redundant drive) and so you just replace the dead drive and run a routine to copy everything over to it from the remaining drive and you haven’t lost any data.
You’ll also appreciate RAID when you’re using your digital video system. Put the video digitizing card in one of the remaining slots. If your onboard audio digitizing capabilities are of less than impressive quality, pick up one of those, too.
Now you’ve got stuff to put on those DVD-RAM disks you’re burning.
Anyone else got a budget they wanna ruin?
Definitely a new monitor. A nice 19" isn’t too expensive and you can bump your resolution nicely.
While I agree that a 19" monitor is very nice, it is guite easy to get along with something smaller. I have used a 15" monitor until just a few weeks ago when I finally got the 19" flat screen. But I still use the 15" as the second monitor off of my system. AHunter3, I don’t know about the Radeon 9000, but with the 9700 Pro, you can already hook up 2 monitors to the one card. Saves on slot usage. 
Cool! Then he can keep the 17 and add the 19!
Seriously, once you’ve used a dual-monitor system, you’ll be addicted to having multiple screens and you’ll never be happy with just one again. (Having a triple is additionally convenient, probably a lot more than you’re thinking if you’ve never used one, but it isn’t like the difference between one and two).
It depends on what you do with the computer! If you do word processing and other business uses, I’d get a monochrome laser printer. They are still far better than inkjet printers when it comes to printing text. A second monitor (and video card) may be useful if you tend to run out of display space (opening multiple documents, for example). Hard drive space sounds a bit tight to me but that depends on your usage. Or if your PC meets all your needs for now, you could buy some peripherals like a PDA, digital camera, scanner, iPod, or a 5.1-channel surround sound system. Or maybe you can spend the money to improve your Internet connection - do you already have broadband?