I really think a computer should last more than 32 months. Sloop, the computer I built in June 2008, failed yesterday. Coincidentally, I ripped the old HDDs out of Dalek the day before to send it to be recycled. Now I have two old boxes to recycle.
I bought a cheap desktop at the store yesterday and didn't even try to look for a good deal online. I just wanted to have a functioning computer. The new case is 34% smaller by volume (I just measured). I would have gotten something even smaller, but I wanted a t least one PCI slot, one PCI Express slot, and room to mount my old HDD. I named it Occam.
Occam is a Dell. The CPU is a Intel Pentium Dual-Core E5800. One benchmark rates this as 34% faster than Sloop's Athlon 64 X2 6000+, which was an upgrade 18 months ago.