Can I build a good PC under $500?

$500 max is my budget for a PC, but I'm not exactly confident on what parts to buy. Can you help me build one from scratch? What are the best parts I can buy under $500?

Buy whatever's on sale at newegg.com. They pretty much have the lowest prices anywhere, even including brick-and-mortar stores.

The most expensive things will probably be the motherboard, processor, hard drive, and monitor if you don't already have one. Just look for whatever's a few years old, like a slower Pentium 4 or AMD, or maybe a Celeron.

For software, you'll want to go with Free software like Linux, since you'll pay exactly zero. Ubuntu, SuSE, Mandriva, and Fedora are fairly good Linux distributions for someone who's not technically inclined. If you're more of an expert, Slackware, Debian, or Gentoo might be a better choice.