Ok, so when you buy a new notebook, you spend about $1 or $2 thousand with the OS included. When you make your own desktop machine you can get as low as $100 for a good one today, with not a single piece of software included. It can't be much lower, but it can go lot higher.

People, including myself, tend to believe that's the price of a computer, but then there comes the softwares. I just stumbled upon a nice piece of application I could use myself, but it's very specific, very tiny, and most people would never bother about this. And it costs "just $12". That is a lot for something I may use just once or twice!

OS upgrades, hardware malfunction, and your custom set of software actually raise the computer price quite a lot, thus this question: how much we pay in the end for our personal computers?

I'd like to see some statistics on that. Maybe divided into 3 categories or something, but some data with averages, minimum and "maximum" costs would be very nice. Maybe a "cost per year" would be nice.

Just wondering.