[Pirotess]

If you are willing to try building it yourself then that opens up a whole new array of options and its just a damn good idea in my opinion. I'd say the first thing you should do is settle on a processor. Intel or AMD? Once you know that then you can choose chipsets, motherboard companies and finally a mother board. Once you have that you can choose RAM and video and finally you can add in the rest of what makes a system tick.

I am interested though, how much RAM did you have in that XPS? At least a gig?