Choosing the right hardware I, Requirements

My birthday is coming up and since everybody is asking me what I would like to receive as a present I decided I will finally get myself the new pc I want for some time now.
At the moment I am not really satisfied with the system I run, it is getting underpowered and the biggest problem with it is the lack of memory. Software coming out now and future software will want a lot more then the 384 Megabytes in SDRAM available to it in my current Athlon 1500+. Lately I have not really followed the new stuff coming out of the pc market so I will have to do some research into the technology available. Since I am doing the research anyway I thought it would be interesting to document this process and give an insight into the way I choose my new hardware. It might even be interesting for other people who have to make a similar decision.

The first thing to do, as always when buying technology, is to make a list of requirements you have. This includes a list of tasks you want to use the hardware for. This is actually where the outcome of this project will be decided since according to the specs you come up with here you will choose your hardware. Most people use their pc's for a set of different tasks, this list will differ per person off course! My list would include activities most people use their pc for like browsing the Internet, writing documents, programming, downloading content, watching the odd movie, working with large databases, serving content to a select group over the Internet, etc. Since I am not into gaming at all, and if I do play the odd game sometimes I don't mind a lower detail level or a little stuttering in a game, I am pretty patient. To do everything (and more) which I want to do I will not need a very powerful machine so looking in the lower end of the spectrum will be the focus of this journey.
Requirements:

• browsing the Internet
• writing documents
• programming
• downloading content
• watching movies
• working with large databases
• server tasks
• etc.

Let's talk budget, as I said above this is based on my estimate of the income from my birthday. My girlfriend (she is SOOO cool) has already said she would participate:) I would guesstimate I will need about € 250 to buy what I need so that will be what I will aim for. Of course the lower the better but I will not trade requirements for price. If your budget is a little more flexible, consider the amount of money you want to spend, and the components you already have which you can reuse in the new pc. I already have multiple monitors, hard disks, dvd-burners, etc so I will not take this into account in my budget. I have nothing else to buy anything other then a processor, a motherboard and some memory. If the budget allows it would be cool to have a big hard drive since this is one of the things you will never have enough of.

I can see this will be a long post, for readability I will divide it over multiple posts which all will take a step in the decision process. This was number post number one of this series, await new posts as soon as I clean up my notes on the process, which is ongoing at this time.

//Z

Update: The next installment is up!