Several points I'd make:
Don't trust the reviews you see in magazines. The computer press is on the whole dreadful, with a truly alarming level of ignorance amongst many computer journalists, and it is notorious for a near-universal practice of giving positive reviews to the companies that buy the most advertising, regardless of actual merit. Don't even read the computer press, never mind make buying decisions based on that fiction.
Don't buy a Pentium 4, with or without Hyperthreading. The old P4 was throughly trounced performance-wise by the now-defunct Athlon XP, and isn't even in the same race as the Athlon 64. They are very hot and not particularly quick and are well and truly on the way out now. Intel's newest chips are vastly better but won't be available in quantity anytime soon. That leaves you with Sempron (a good choice) or Athlon 64 (a better choice), or else waiting for the new Intel chips to arrive in volume and have their teething troubles sorted out - for that last option, plan on buying around the end of the year or early next year.
RAM: 1GB would do but 2GB would be better. Clock speed: whatever you can afford. Don't forget that different chips deliver different performance levels reardless of raw clock speed, which means that you can't assume that two different 3000MHz parts are equivalent - they can bbe a long, long way apart.
Storage: Samsung make the most reliable hard drives on the market, there is really no point in buying any other brand at present, though you might consider Hitachi if you need to. Performance differences between drives are marginal these days, excepting only the noticably faster Western Digital Raptor line, but that comes at the cost of a very poor reliability record.
Optical drives: LG are good, but just about all the brands are OK these days.
Don't ever, ever, ever buy a supermarket vomit box (Compaq, Acer, Dell, Hewlett-Packard, etc.). These things are guaranteed to deliver less performance, with a shorter warranty, and a much higher spare parts cost than anything else on the market. If you want a can of baked beans, go to a supermarket. If you want a camera, go to a camera shop. If you want a computer, go to a computer shop.
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