Yay! Posting this from my brand new, one-day old computer. It's absolutely amazing going from my laptop to this, and especially satisfying choosing the best graphics settings on games and still getting flawless frame rates.

The specs, for those of you who are interested (bought as components):
Intel Core 2 Duo 3GHz
GeForce GTX 260
2GB RAM
750GB hard drive

The processor is twice the speed of my laptop's, four times the RAM, and I have no idea how much better that video card is compared to the Radeon Xpress 200M my laptop uses. A whole lot, from what I can tell. Also got with those an Asus 20" widescreen monitor, a nice soft-touch keyboard, and a set of Logitech X-140 speakers. A friend of my brother helped me get all of this together for about £750.

Not much point to this thread other than to enthuse about how happy I am with my new set-up

Wow that is nice. I wish I could have talked myself into that graphics card. You should probably consider upgrading your ram to 4gb, but even at 2gb you should be ok for a year.

Niiiiice.

Haha. For a second I thought you got a laptop mobile version of GeForce GTX 260. Damn that would be hardcore yet incredibly superfluous.

nice spec's

personally I would have gone for the ATI 4870 as it offers equal or better performance in pretty much 90% of the games out there and is a good £30-£40 cheaper. There's nothing essentially wrong with the GTX 260 and on a 20" monitor you probably won't be going above 1680 x 1050 so you'll be hitting 30+ fps in everything other than Crysis and AoC so start bumping up the AA and AF :D.

and here's me stuck on my MacBook Pro till I move back to the UK in about 9 months...