no worries and thanks. By the way the latest Issue of PCPowerplay has a how to build a PC for yourself section - well illustrated, targeting a sub $900 build.
If Alex's daughter likes to play Skyrim then you need a PC with a bit of grunt - especially on the game's harder settings. If you use Nexus Mod Manager to add tens to hundreds of mods these can add a lot more immersion and challenge to the game. On the second hardest difficulty setting, even with say 5 tough followers, when 50 dreugar attack and their shouts are throwing you all over a cavern - winning is not easy (staying alive even with great armour and weapons isn't easy)!
At ultra high resolution my machine is quite a bit laggy at intense times, just when you need real responsiveness. I run an old Intel quad core Conroe2 Q6600 at stock speeds (2.3GHZ), with 8GB RAM, two SSDs, 6 other HDDs and a AMD 6970 graphics card. I could easily double both the Compute and Graphics speed, but it would require switching motherboard, CPU, heat-sink and memory to double compute - say around $700 - and modernising the graphics card would consume say a further $500. I don't feel a circa $1,200 spend to quadruple my gaming performance is warranted when I have other life priorities at the moment (this from a man who in the past 20 years probably spent well over $30K on PCs)!
The one thing I would stress is buy high quality, brand name gear, especially:
1. Motherboards (everything else runs on them so don't skimp), Gigabyte with its solid state capacitors and excellent power design and shielding are a preferred solution, after that Abit, Asus, MSI aren't bad alternatives.
2. CPU - powers everything, get a great heat sink too - don't stint to save $30 here on either part
3. Power supply - clean reliable power is a must. I love Corsair 800W power supplies or else Antec - gives you beautiful consistent power at high efficiency and buy over 700 watts to give you room to future expand
4. Solid State drives - I have seen many brands at all price points fail; only the Samsung 840 and 830 Evos seem to be faultless for me - love them
5. RAM - I just get generic to match my CPU clock speed, but either 8GB (2 * 4GB)or 16GB (2 * 8GB) as a generic brand in a twin stick configuration are probably okay
6. Case - well I personally prefer larger (i.e. full tower) cases and ensure they have several, quiet few fans to provide a non-irritatingly loud air-cooling. Read any review and grab the highly recommended cases.
7. Hard drives - well buy 1, 2 or 3 TB sized hard drives - I have a preference for 7,200 rpm speed drives from Samsung
8. Sound card - I add on a sound card and use either Soundblaster X-Fi Extreme (a great but dated card nowadays) would be happy to give the Asus Xonar a try!
9. LAN cards - don't bother - just use the inbuilt Gigabyte LAN port on the Motherboard.
Hope that helps. Bottom line - a well constructed $2,000 PC today should run rings around a PC I custom built and tuned and was state of art 6 years or so ago for well over $6,000. Even a well spent $1,500 machine could run all games today at very high settings. A $1,000 machine will run most of yester-years games (and hell Serious Sam, Return to Castle Wolfenstein, Oblivion, Pain Killer, Half Life 2, Far Cry and Power slide where brilliant games that soaked up many hours of my life in years gone by).