I'd like to be a PC gamer, but I'm lazy, poor and don't really know enough about PCs to conveniently deal with any problems. I admit it.
My PC was £300 from PC World with a 17" monitor thrown in. No way that's gonna play anything, but it was bought in an "I just killed my laptop and I have loads of coursework to do, but hardly any money because the Student Loans Company are messing me around" sort of emergency.
Since then, I've had to upgrade the memory to just get Vista to run without hanging every few seconds. I got stitched up because, although I know how to install stuff like that, I'm not confident enough in my ability to do it without fucking something up so I took it into a computer shop... ended up paying £50 for some caffeine-wired twat to mock me at 90 words per second for buying a cheap Packard Bell thing while installing a 2Gb stick, and they kept hold of the 1Gb stick that was already in there. I spent £80 on a new graphics card a few weeks ago just so that I could run Oblivion, luckily I had a mate with a bit of knowledge on hand to help me install that.
Now I'm thinking about a new processor and probably another memory upgrade but, because the whole thing runs like arse as it is - at least once a day it dies to the point where I have to turn it off at the wall, every diagnostic tool has drawn a blank as to why - I'm starting to think I might just as well abandon the whole thing and build a new PC from scratch. Or, rather, buy the bits and get someone to build it for me, because God knows it wouldn't bloody work if I did it myself.
The punchline being... that's a lot of time, money and effort for a skint and busy student when it's possible to just buy a disc and stick it in the 360 which didn't cost me anything 'cos it was a birthday present.
Horses for courses, I guess.