Jeeves

Or just go AMD, save some cash, and have a rig you can upgrade cheaply if need be. There's no point paying absolute top dollar for the best given in 3 months it won't be, but there's no point getting something that's no good today because tomorrow it'll just be abysmal. Going by local prices - expect yours to be lower - an i7 is $1349 and a Phenom x6 is $265. Given you won't be getting 5 times the processor, I wouldn't personally pay five times the price. Dollar for dollar AMD's outperform, so if you don't need that 5% more compute, it seems silly spending 500% more cash. And if you want to do anything like rendering, a hexacore phenom is going to put an i7 quad to shame.

On the flip side, get a good mobo. Makes it easier to upgrade in future and less likely to die in present. Especially if you're going AMD - Intel change socket more often than some people change socks, but if you have AMD you can usually upgrade the CPU or mobo separately rather than needing to save up for both if either breaks or gets old down the track.

When it comes to the GFX, its worth getting a decent one if you intend to use 7 (it'll use the extra cycles), need to render, use CS5 a lot, or play games. For gaming you probably want something higher end, depending on screen size - on a 17" display even a 4550 will run most games on full settings. For workstation you'll be fine as long as it says DX11 and ATI on the box, and its just how much you want to spend.

Physical storage has to be Seagate, and the best SSD seems to change almost daily, so just Google before you buy to check for bad reviews. RAM Dangerman's hit the nail on the head - just because its cheap theres still no point buying something you don't need. I get by with 3GB of DDR2 running an XP VM, multiple browsers, DW, PS, FW & Office. You can always get more later for less.

Overall what's good depends on how you want to use it, how long you want it to last, and how much you're willing to spend, but that's how I usually go.

Not sure of the set amount you can get on loan here, but I do know people who can't finish their intended degrees off it. The bright side is there's no interest. The downside is it never expires - I am really amazed to hear yours does. The punchline is it comes out of tax, so after taking a bigger slice of your paycheck, a graduate earns considerably less than someone without a degree.

Go to uni - you'll loose 3-4 years of potential income, and get paid less when you're done.

Ahh beans. We do it differently down here, its instant noodles from Asian supermarkets all the way. If you can say hello in Mandarin you can eat for a week off $5. I hate student life. I found the only people who hang around campus any longer than they need to are the ones who had no direction or reason for being there, pathetic individuals who were willing to pay to hang around with like-minded people who'd tell them how cool they were as their debt mounted up and their futures remained static. I remember on my induction day when we were addressed by the student union representative, and he was proud of having stayed at uni for the last 7 years. Proud? Of taking over 7 years to finish a 3-year arts degree? People who go and do something with their lives must really be missing out on that sense of accomplishment.

Psych does seem fairly irrelevant for wanting to get into avionics, if you had no interest in studying the skills and techniques of your chosen field, are you sure you chose the right one? Having a degree may set a baseline, but if that line is "indecisive arts student" that's not necessarily a good thing. If you had two candidates for an avionics position, one of them has a degree in aeronautical engineering and the others a psych student, which would you hire? I'm glad you think it was money well spent as you're the one who has to pay it back, but I do hope it wasn't a complete waste.

Fun fact: Australia's second biggest export is education. This causes a nice cascade effect with universities rushing to improve their capacity rather than courses, and needing to import the lecturers and materials. Then you have the students, who can get a visa with the tip of a hat, raise the costs, refuse to integrate with society, rape the countries resources, then take their skills elsewhere to make room for the next batch.

To maintain the value of the cost-inflated education system, it is then impossible to find any job not needing some form of degree, even though nobody working in the country can afford one. An Australian university consists of 100,000 imported students, being taught by 100 imported teachers, at 10 times the cost of going to China for the same education. As fees continue to rise, so does racial violence, the general crime rate, unemployement, and skills shortages follow. Just so you know what to look forward to

Over the channel in Kiwiland, of course, they pay people to study so that they may contribute to society, and don't really suffer from the above issues. But why do that when you could pay to import people to export skills instead? Those crazy kiwi's!

Personally, I have a Multimedia IT degree, and its not worth the paper its written on. I found one of a handful of professions in the country where experience outweighs education, and will be paying it back for life. Then there's the fact if anyone did check it, they'd find out its so bad, the university asked me in my second year to rewrite it for them.

No kidding, going to cost $43 billion to roll it out across Australia. But in a decade, I might finally break teh 1.5mbps barrier