May be building a PC - Suggestions for budget under $1,000 USD?

[mrstickball]

Squilliam said:

Just some quickie questions, if you answer these we'll be able to tailor the PC for you.

1. Are you noise sensitive, do you have any specific desires for the computer case?

2. What are you plans for backing up your data in case of failure?

3. What size monitor are you looking at, how many monitors and what configuration? Are you looking at say 1 in potrait mode? 3 in landscape?

4. How big are your spreadsheets etc?

5. Whats your biggest typical complaint when using a PC system?

6. Why not a laptop? Any particular reason?

1. No. I really have no preference on a computer case. I'd prefer to save money on one, because AFAIK, its the one thing that doesn't radically change the performance of the computer (except for ensuring you have good CPU fans in the case)
2. External drives like USB flash and the like. I won't have a ton of memory requirements for backups, so I should be able to handle it that way
3. Probably 1, 20" to start.
4. Spreadsheets are at 20-30MB and growing. The biggest issue is that I am doing a ton of match/indexes on tens of thousands of rows, dozens of times. My current laptop takes 1-2 minutes to process each iteration of the spreadsheet, which takes a long time.
5. I really don't have a ton of complaints. I need a new computer because the computer I have now is a company laptop, and I want something else, in case they ever need this one back.
6. I would be okay with another laptop. However, I need a home PC, so my thought was that I could get a better-specced desktop for the same price.