I thought my P.C.had died at the weekend but thankfully I was mistaken but the whole affair got me thinking about getting a new machine but as ever this has left me with more questions than answers.
 
I'm a 58 year old 'Bedroom' musician that uses a DAW to record songs that I've written and that's as far as it goes and therefore you can see that my needs are 'very modest'.
 
In the past I have just bought a reasonabley spec'd PC and added a sound card with ASIO drivers and it has worked fine for me however I dont know if that's the best way to go.
 
So my first question is 'Do I use an off the shelf P.C.or should I be looking to create something on a more AD-Hoc Basis

You should get by with a reasonably spec'd PC.  Mine was off the shelf.  You want a fast drive 7200rpm or SSD and 8G mem in my opinion.  Add a decent sound card and you'll be off and running.

Hi. I would say that you would be ok with an off the shelf pc. Be sure that it is enough "up to date", so if you decide to venture into some heavy vsti' s, you will have the horsepower. Get at least 8Gb of RAM.
Best of luck.
Ps. For a better experience I would suggest getting a dedicated Audio Interface with proper ASIO drivers, if you do not have that already.

If you're tech savvy, you can build a better custom DAW than any off-the-shelf machine.
 
You can hand select each component for silence and speed... and the (quality motherboard) BIOS will have all parameters necessary to achieve super low/consistent DPC Latency (which is paramount when running heavy loads at the smallest ASIO buffer sizes).

Thanks for your input guys . . . Whilst I've never 'built' a machine before I have friends who can help me with that. The question I would ask you all here you use the phrase 'A better custom DAW' so how better is 'better' ..... if you were going to put a percentage on it how much better will a custom machine machine be . . . and I guess from that I can  then work out if it's worth the effort

It is more about the money... You can buy most pc configurations of the shelf, but it will cost more.
If you do not need to go into heavy projects, you will be ok with a "upper midrange" of the shelf pc.
All the best.

With a custom machine, you have complete control over what goes in... and exactly how it's configured.
Choose top-tier components for each... and configure it well... and you'll have a machine that's superior to an off-the-shelf machine.  You won't get that attention to detail (DAW performance) in a general-purpose solution.

• Case (quiet/robust)
• Motherboard (quality unit with proper parameters for super low/consistent DPC Latency)
• HDs or SSDs (fast quiet units)
• Power-supply (robust quiet unit)
• CPU cooler (over-spec'd large/quiet unit)
• OS Install (clean/lean - no "value added" bloat)

 
The higher your performance expectations, the more significant the difference
Whether you need that level of performance... that's a question only you can answer.  
 

IfItMovesFunkIt
Thanks for your input guys . . . Whilst I've never 'built' a machine before I have friends who can help me with that. The question I would ask you all here you use the phrase 'A better custom DAW' so how better is 'better' ..... if you were going to put a percentage on it how much better will a custom machine machine be . . . and I guess from that I can  then work out if it's worth the effort

 It's like legos.  Also read lots of reviews. Assembly is part of the review process.