Well, unfortunately the reasons youve listed above are exactly why I got out of it.Back in the day of flight sim98,x-plane, etc etc, I used to have 3 or 4 vid cards cause games were buggy as could be and would only run properly with certain cards LOL, it rapidly became a $3000/year investment that was worthless in 8-9months just to keep up with memory,CPU's,and vid cards.
These days, to play dvd's, do most basic stuff, and not have to worry about having upgrade very often, a person can easily build a system for a few hundred bucks.Ive got a duron 800 I still use regularly, and I got it when it first came out a LONG time ago, it does just fine, heck when it was new it did quite well with games, now on Doom 3 the FPS is like 8-10fps(read not playable).But for everything else it does just fine, its a good stable workhorse.Probelm is for what I paid for it then, I can easily build a system thats 4-6 times faster, that sucks bigtime, makes me feel used.Your not alone, progress waits for nobody.