Staying within the budget is a major concern when buying a system, whether for business or personal use. Clearly, a top-of-the-line setup will cost more than the average home PC, but there's no sense in paying for features you'll never use. Buying a high-end workstation as a home entertainment machine is overkill, just as selecting a value system for doing engineering design will leave you underequipped. Desktops can cost as little as $400 for a home system to more than $10,000 for a high-end graphics workstation. Below is a summary of price ranges and what you can expect within each.
 

Budget-minded user (up to $600).

Yes, there are vendors who offer free desktops through a series of rebates, sales promotions, and your commitment to sign with an ISP for any number of years. These are usually value systems with Celeron or Duron processors, 10 to 20GB hard drives, 64MB of memory, and a CD-ROM drive but little else. In most cases, monitors are sold separately and the machines are not easily upgraded.

Look for a desktop in this price range if you're just getting started, on a very tight budget, or simply want a desktop for writing school papers and surfing the Web.
 

Mainstream home or small-business user ($600 to $1,000).

At the low end of this price range, you can expect an 800-MHz Celeron or Duron system with 64MB of memory, a 20GB hard drive, a CD-ROM drive, and possibly a 15-inch monitor. Upgrading to a Pentium III class machine with 128MB of memory and a secondary CD-RW drive will bring you to the top of the range, as will a 400-MHz G3 iMAC with similar components.

Look for a desktop in this price range  if you need a machine that will handle home office or small office applications or light multimedia functions, such as mixing and burning audio CDs.
 

Mainstream business or experienced home user ($1,000 to $1,500).

Desktops in this price range can fill a wide variety of needs for both business and home users. This type of system should feature 128MB of memory, a 40GB hard drive, a 17-inch monitor, a 32MB, 4X AGP video card, and either a Pentium III, Pentium 4 or Athlon processor. As you add more memory, upgrade the video capability, and install CD-RW and DVD drives, the price will hit the top of the range.

Look for a desktop in this price range if you're a home enthusiast, you want to run DVD movies and most games, or you need the extra power to quickly load Web pages that are graphical and contain rich content.
 

Power user ($1,500 to $3,000).

This is where you'll find the high-end, expert gamer, and power user systems, and midrange workstations. These systems utilize the fastest processors (Pentium 4, Athlon, and G4) and come with at least 128MB of fast memory, a 40GB hard drive, a CD-ROM drive, a 17-inch monitor, and a 32MB graphics card. Upgrade to 256MB of memory and 64MB of video RAM and add an 80MB hard drive, a DVD-RW drive and other options such as fast Ethernet and a three-way speaker system, and you're at the top of this range.

Look for a desktop in this price range if your computing needs demand cutting-edge technology-especially if you're involved in high-end multimedia editing, online 3-D gaming, or Web development.
 

High-end user ($3,000 and above).

In a high-end professional workstations, a configuration with dual processors, 1GB of RIMMs (the trademark for memory modules made with Rambus high-speed memory), 128MB of graphics memory, a four-drive, high-capacity RAID storage solution, and a flat-panel display, the cost can top $10,000.

Look for a desktop in this price range if you're into computer-aided design, engineering, or high-end animation.