Quote - Acadia, you have two paths to follow: custom built or off the shelf name brand. SInce you appear to be more of a software oriented person rather than tech enthusiast, may I suggest you consider purchasing a Dell desktop? ( No, I don't work for Dell or own any of their stock.)
I'd try giving their website a careful perusal, then give them a call at their toll free number. Tell the rep exactly how you plan to use your computer to avoid going through an endless list of available configurations. You'll want two gigs of memory, and an AGP profile video card with at least 256 megs of onboard ram. Since you're a Poser user, I'd opt for as large a hard drive as I could afford. Whether you go for a dual core or not is your call, but I'd seriously consider a dc motherboard to prevent your system from becoming obsolete before it's out of the box.
Dell also offers the option of purchasing a refurbished system that can be upgraded to meet your needs. You may also wish to check with friends and relatives since many businesses have discount plans with Dell that allow employees to purchase their systems at appreciable discounts. For example, my brother receives a ten per cent discount on all his Dell purchases through the company he works for. 
Good luck.

I will absolutely not spend my money on a crappy Dell.  Based on my laptop experience I have found out first hand that their products are not built to last and that they don't care about the customer.

I want to have something custom built by either my nephew or the local computer company who did my computer upgrade.

I want to get a price from them. And I want to be able to search out the components myself and see if I can buy them cheaper and then just pay to have it put together.

I bought my first computer in 2000 from a local company, and had a year of blue screen crashing nightmares and reformats every 3 weeks because it had substandard parts. 11 months after that I took it to another company and had them gut it and put in all new and different parts. It cost me $1700.00 that was in February 2001. I never saw another blue screen after that, and it's the computer that I'm using right now. It's only lately that something is going on with it. It might just need to be cleaned out because I've never done that.  But it's not really capable of running poser very well.  I need to jump through hoops to render an image either through reducing texture sizes, hiding parts, and rendering in pieces. I can't even render with raytracing.

In 2002 I bought a Dell laptop and  didn't really like it much and didn't use it save for maybe 12 times for the first 20 months. Then I started to use it regularly after that and 18 months later, 5 months after the warranty expired, the motherboard failed.  They didn't even have the courtesy to acknowledge my correspondence to them until I spent all day steam rolling my way through their various departments.  The result was basically that they don't care what happens to you after they have your money.

I'm hoping to be able to get a good computer  cheaper this time by being more informed and perhaps purchasing what I need myself without having to pay the inflated prices.

"It is good to see ourselves as others see us. Try as we may, we are never
able to know ourselves fully as we are, especially the evil side of us.
This we can do only if we are not angry with our critics but will take in good
heart whatever they might have to say." - Ghandi