Personally I love HP products especially the Pavilions I have a few of them and have had excellent luck, I do however prefer the AMD processors over the Intel, I have had both in HP Pavilions and from now on will only get AMD.
The first thing you need to decide is if you want a pc with Windows XP or are you ready to risk trying Vista? that will definitely affect where to look because not as many XP computers are available now.
I would not go with less than 1Gig RAM and really preferably
it should be 2 or 3 Gig especially if you are going with Vista you will need that to run it well.
A good size hard drive anywhere from 150 gig up.
HP is my preferred brand of the big names, but I also like checking out the local shops that do custom builds, You can get exactly what you want with out a bunch of junk added on and many times they are less expensive plus you have someone to turn to locally if you have problems.

IBM/lenovo also makes good product.

My flatpanel monitor is an Acer which I love, it was very reasonable in price and has exceeded my expectations. The one thing to consider on a monitor is the type of connection you will need to connect to your pc, if possible you want one that has all connection types because that will give you more flexibility. However mine only has analog and it has been just fine for my needs.

ANd of course if it is just your hard drive that has died I would get a new hard drive they are fairly cheap and put in there and keep that old pc as a spare or to use as a back up for file storage. Or load one of the free linux operating systems on it and give linux a try, I love it and use it daily.

I have had 4 PCs, Compac, HP and Sony and like them all, especially like the Sony. It had a C & D drive, I saved my personal stuff on the D drive. The HP only has one CD drive, when I make edit my music CDs, I have to save it to my hard drive instead of directly to the CD. I don't care much for that, but have gotten used to it. I like to buy mine at Circuit City, they are very good to help me. If it needed more Ram, they installed it free. I had to pay for the ram of course.

I am amazed at the steals out there lately. Friends recently bought an HP Pavilion with 250gig hard drive, 4 gigs of Ram with Vista and all the usual trimmings. This along with a 21.5 Acer LCD screen, mouse and keyboard was packaged for $599 - and remember this is in Canada so it should be less south of the border.

Both Samsung and Acer make great LCD monitors, you will appreciate the extra desk space it provides too.

Stargazzer have you considered installing a DVD burner in your computer? Name brands can be had for about $50 then you could use it with your CD player for music burning as long as the power supply is man enough to accommodate the added drive.

Stargazzer another option is to buy a stand alone external usb CD Burner drive or DVD burner, I found a really nice USB CDburner on a clearance shelf at Staples for super cheap. That way I can use it for any of computers, just plug it into USB and go.

I'm Mac these days, but among my PC friends, Sony-owners are happiest.

Owbist and Raven Thanks for the tips, I will keep that in mind.

there is an expansion bay, I find something like that as a challenge and I learn what I have to. I do fine with what I have. There is just an extra step to the process.

The only thing that has gotten the best of me is the IPod. There is a technical column in our newspaper, the author said she had thrown hers in a drawer after trying twice to operate it. that made me feel better. I bought a book and am still working at it.