You will need hard drive, case, power supply, memory, dvd drive (s), sound card if you want to upgrade on board sound and a good processor cooler.... that should get you going
Much better to build one in my oppinion because places like PC world put a good processor in them but the rest of the stuff is rubbish
depends what you want the PC to do... obviously if you want to play latest games then you will need decent graphic card , 2gb memory and a nifty processor.
A child could build a PC they are that easy