My problem is as follows:

My current computer has an i7 processor, SSD, SLI'd graphics cards, a ton of RAM and it can quite easily run anything I throw at it without breaking a sweat.

Unfortunately I have the nagging suspicion that not everyone breaks out their life savings to purchase the latest and greatest hardware every year and I'm worried I might be writing code which runs fine on my computer but is unplayable on lesser computers.

So I figured I'd hook up my old computer and use that to test my code and make sure I wasn't going too crazy... Tragically it is also too overpowered to break a sweat from any code I can throw at it, and it turns out my laptop is about the same.

Having no other computers laying around at home - I've decided I'll try to assemble a really cheap basic computer that I feel would be a fair minimum spec for any work I do.

My first question is what generation of processor should I target? Would an Intel Core 2 Duo processor be a fair baseline? Should I go lower?

Second question is what generation of graphics card? I've heard all sorts of bad things about Intel Integrated graphics and they're generally what powers any computers without a discrete card. I think that would be a good level of performance to target but none of them support DX11 from what I can tell which is a little disappointing (I'm not really using DX11 features but they'd be nice to have if I want to experiment in the future).

For the RAM, I'll probably scrounge up a gig or two, and whatever will do for the HDD.

I was considering just picking up a netbook as they're pretty lousy in all respects but they kind of seem a little -too- lousy...

Suggestions? Advice? I'm quite out of touch with what "normal" users would have for hardware. I've looked at what stores are selling for their basic computers but I should probably be looking at what they were selling as basic computers 3 years ago but of course their websites don't show that.