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[JoshuaFH]

So Christmas and New Years have left me with some extra spending money due to some unexpected generosity, and I was thinking of replacing my computer, which is quite the senior in computer-years.

I heard that buying parts and assembling your own computer is both cheaper and better, but I'll be damned if I know a lick about what's inside of computers or how they interact with eachother. Can anyone lend me some advice, or just steer me towards a good site?

[Sir Andrew Ryan Farnsley]

Well I use New Egg for all my computer needs... It's getting on the later side here (almost 1) so my whole will power to type out a long winded explanation for everything is kinda shot... But New Egg as far as pricing goes is generally half way decent. They have some good deals usually. Just remember more expensive doesn't mean better. Plenty of people in the computer parts business take advantage of those who don't have a inkling of knowledge and sucker them into buying a 50MB hard drive for 500 dollars... If somebody else hasn't given and explanation as to what you need tomorrow I'll give you a more in depth explanation but generally you need

A monitor (duh)
A mouse (duh)
Keyboard (duh)
speakers (Nice but not necessary)
A tower (to keep all your guts together)
A Motherboard
A CPU (I think they have quad cores now, which is sweet)
A video card
A sound card
some RAM
Power supply
Cooling element of some sort (Some have liquid, some have fans, some do coils)
Cd drive
A hard drive

That's all I can think of right off the top of my head... I'll go back tomorrow and nose around some more and see what I can explain and what not... If anybody else reads this and has the time/desire feel free to beat me to the punch and explain it yourself lol 

[Funk]

first check what pc has,  can you reuse any of it( i.e. the Power supply or some fans)
some bits are nice to get new ones but arent need.

geting the stats of a few other computer and there price to help you get a idea of what can be done.

note that windows is a good £200+ chunk of cash.

can you give any idea of the sort of thing you aim to do with it?
the stats of your computer are a big help
(accessories,system tools,system information)

parts explanation

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

A Motherboard (every thing works of this,the type and number of slots limts the other parts) 
A CPU (Clock rate how fast it runs, cores just let it brake the tasks up)
A video card (if you not playing a a lot of games then you can cut costs).
A sound card (unless you must have load of speakers some cheap desktop speakers and a cheap sound card)

[HideousBeing]

Newegg is awesome and there are plenty of guides to help you along on the internet! If you aren't super rich and throwing money around, I recommend staying away from the latest and greatest, but still staying relatively close. Hardware drops in price pretty quickly after a few months and you can usually make an amazing PC with $1000-$1500 (probably even including windows and all the extra junk like speakers/monitor)

Post your build on a forum dedicated to this stuff (and here!). People will usually tell you if it is going to be completely broken or have bottlenecks somewhere and might make some recommendations. Use google!