Delilah, Chris is right, older PC's can be reconfigured to be used for other useful things. I have a really old PC tha only has my old arcade games pre 2008. It only needs a graphic card wth 128MB of gRAM and 2GB of sysRAM, and two old 40GB hard drives.
You can pick up older, but sill decent hardaware via EBay. OR!!!! It may be worth buying a second hand full PC. A lot of gamers like to have the latest cpu's, graphic cards, motherboards etc, so tend to upgrade their PC's within a couple of years; those PC's often found on E-Bay, can be bid on and won for amazngly low prices. Ones older than around 3 years or more can sell really cheaply. The only danger is getting a bad deal from a crook, but generally I've found E-bay pretty good. I purchased a laptop via E-bay back in July. It had to be returned because the monitor wasn't working; they said they would give me a replacement, but kept putting me off. Apparently if you haven't asked for your money back within 28 days E-Bay can't do anything, but if it's faulty and you complain to EBay, within the time limt, they will give you your money back. I went over the 28 days; in fact, I left it for over three months, hoping to get a similar replacement. They had offered one replacement, but the specs were nowhere near as good as the ones I'd bid on. So I refused that offer. When I contacted them later, they had stopped trading on E-Bay. I contacted E-Bay, who basically said, hard luck; however, I paid for the laptop via PayPal, who have a much better returns policy. I'd even neglected to ask for a receipt when the courier came to pick the laptop up, but because of the correspondence I'd had between the vendor and because I was within their 180 day returns limit they gave me back the full amount.
The general rule with respect to the price of computers on E-Bay; if its a fully working computer you'll usually get the computer for less than half the price you'd pay to actually buy and build the same computer from new components. If it's a computer with a piece of the hardware missing, for example it may not have the hard drives or the RAM or the graphics card. Those tend to sell for around a third or less of the price of the components within them. (for example, I was looking to upgrade my sons computer last year and found a decent quad core, with virtually new hi spec Motherboard, RAM, CPU etc. The seller said he'd removed the graphic card otherwise it was in working order. The Motherboard didn't have a graphics chip, so you'd need to buy a card for it to wark (as there was no onboard graphics chip you needed a graphics card to connect the monitor). The total cost of all the components, including a full sized gaming case was almost £2000 (approx $3100). The thing sold for £495. I'd meant to bid on it, but missed the last moments of the bidding (I always bid in the last 30 seconds with a bid just over the limit, then immediately add a second bid up to what I'd be willing to pay). So could have got it for less than a quater of its worth. The cost of a reasonable graphics card would have set me back another £300+ (the top end latest cards cost around £1000) unless I bought a second hand one.
I paid over £700 for each of the graphic cards I have in my main computer back in Dec 2011 and although they are now considered old (2 x Gainward Nvidia GTX 580 Phantoms with 3GB of gRAM on each card), they still allow me to max out every new game that's released.
I spent a couple of months making notes on sales of various computers via EBay, I'd list all of the hardware specs, make a note of the final bid price then find out how much it would cost to build the comnputers using the listed components. After doing this to around 50 computers, the average price of a fully working computer tended to be (as I said above) less than half of the cost to build a new one with the same components. Buying one that may need a new graphics card is worth it if you don't mind finishing off the computer yourself. They are so easy to build these days, not only can you find you tube videos showing you how to do it, compters are basically plug and play types, so its just a case of screwing in the Motherboard, then adding the various components (RAM, CPU, Graphics card, sound card, cooling etc, (though most Motherboards have decent sound chips now. (Sound cards really aren't needed unless you want to play music with a decent speaker system, then a sound card is advised).
If you need any advise I can help. We could talk via Skype and I could direct you on the build (if you decided to go that route) :)
just PM me and I'll give you my Skype name.
