I just built my roomate a decent system for around $400. Its a AMD Athalon XP 2.1Ghz, AOpen motherboard AOpen Video card w/ 128mb DDR Ram, um... 120gb hard drive, CD burner, 512mb DDR System Ram, and some other goodies. My house was struck by lightning and it fried everything in his room. He is still fighting with the company who made his surge protector (who will remain nameless, NEWPOINT!) to get them to reimburse him for his damages.
I on the other hand have a 12 hour uninteruptable power supply (battery backup) that I scraped up off Ebay for just shy of $200. Those things are great. The power goes off and BAM it switches to the batterys and your PC doesn't even hiccup.
Well anyway everything is going down in price so you should be able to find something alot better than a PIII.
