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Sharky Extreme makes good system recommendations:

http://www.sharkyextreme.com/

The PC Parts picking guide has excellent price/performance explanations... But they haven't updated things in a while (a real shame).

http://shsc.info/PCPartsPickingGuide

(note: I haven't built a system in a while)

You are spot on and I would mod you up if I had points. I don't think the HDD manufacturers are behind this though. The simpler (and I think correct) reason is that older media used to be easier to recover data from. Newer hardware is different and the old methods do not apply. http://shsc.info/DataRecovery#titelanker5

For Windows users, here is a fairly comprehensive list of useful software, the vast majority of which is free (as in beer). The list is a bit unwieldy and unevenly updated, but I've snagged a few useful programs by browsing through it recently so I think it's pretty useful for those looking to get off unnecessary commercial apps.

Personally, I like the PC parts picking guide and it's graph of
video card price vs performance.

http://shsc.info/PCPartsPickingGuide#titelanker13

Even more interesting is that their chosen graphics cards seem to
scale -- more money gets you proportionally more performance.
However if you scroll up to the cpu section, it doesn't scale so well.

Why on earth should they switch it off as a default? The ability to go back and forth in your history without rerendering the entire page again is a great feature.

I've never understood why people with 1-2GB of RAM freak out when applications actually use some of that available memory. What good is a ton of memory if it's not being used? Firefox is a memory pig, yes, but it's giving it back to Windows should other programs actually need it.

The same can be said about the aggresive memory trimming. Why are people willing to put up with a frozen UI whenever Firefox trims its memory is beyond me.

I have plenty of free memory and don't really care either way, so I value usability higher than low memory use. People should probably get their learn on about Windows memory usage before posting any more wrong statements about Firefox.

That's not to say that Firefox (and some of the more well-known) extensions don't leak memory like a proverbial sieve. I'm just saying that the above instances aren't memory leaks and anyone claiming that they are should be modded down.

http://shsc.info/UsefulWindowsSoftware

Somethingawful.com, their hardware/software forum has a nice wiki up with a pretty comprehensive list of usefull shareware/freeware/OSS software categorized and with a quick description of each app.

Clicky. Note that since this is somethingawful they may put up a redirect based on referrer because that's what they do with links from slashdot around those parts. You may want to copy the link and manually paste it in or bookmark it for the future to avoid overloading their server or seeing anuses.

If you skip down to the section on motherboards, they show that SLI isn't even remotely worth it.

I'd have to say that Watts is not the most important thing in power supplies. The amount of Amps it can deliver on each rail is more important:
http://shsc.info/PowerSupplyGuide/