OK geeks and geekettes, I got a little under $400 for the purchase of a new comp to get myself back into the swing of things, my main priorities are a CD burner and a half ass graphix card, like a radeon 9200 or something, a 40 gig HD would be good, any ideas, comments, hints, invisiclues (free drink to first person to PM me what that was from )

"How fast? Are you particular to AMD or Intel? You can pick up MOST of the items you already listed cheap off the net (Ebay). I built a system for someone and picked up a barebones XP1900, Gigabyte motherboard, power supply & lighted case with side window off of Ebay for about $135 + shipping (less if you don't need a case and power supply). I re-used some of the old components to keep cost down and built it for about $200. I would suggest going to Pricewatch.com and searching under motherboarrd/CPU combos. I am assuming you will be assembling this yourself. If not Ebay & Pricewatch would STILL be your best best to do price comparisons " This from Mr. Shaper

DUDE, i have a dell. and i LOVE my dell. and they do have finance options if you are interested. they also have several refurbished desktops you can look into also.

Bad credit means no financing, building my own will take considerably more money tho, I'm favoring Athlon but will take what I can get, just looking for a full system for immediate startup, shopping begins tomorrow. I might just get an eMachines as a base and then rebuild with that...

From what I've seen of them, starting with an e-machine is not a 'start' but more of a placeholder. IE, if you buy an e-machine don't plan on being able to really upgrade it that much, it would be more along the lines of something to use while you piece together a real system.

hmnmm... well, that's not a lot of money, but you should be able to get a blue & white G3 for that these days.

you can always add a bigger hard drive, a G4 processor, and a faster video card later.

i agree with gwenhwyfar i love my dell as well.

DO NOT get one of those OEM (Dell, Gateway, Compaq, etc.) machines! A lot of those low end systems are assembled with low end parts. When I did tech support for a while MOST of the problems came from OEM computers. Let someone build you a system to your specs and in your price range. I can put together what you're asking for at about $325-$350. Depending on what you actually plan on using the computer for this should be enough for the average user with nice upgrade capability later. Upgrade an OEM machine while it's still under warrantee and you void the warrantee. By the way. I have ALL the parts available (with the exception of the processor) at my disposal now. Email my wife if you're interested.
....Mr. Shaper

I just have to say, I love my mac.

My mac is so good to me. It never gives me a blue screen of death.

We bought my husband a PC off ebay, just the cpu cause he has everything else, and it's NICE... but he does lots of work on it, and I think we paid about 700 for it. Before you buy a dell I'd check ebay and see what you can get built for you if you can't (for whatever reason) hook up with someone locally to build you something.

But mac osX i just can't praise enough, and this coming from a girl who's first computer was in 1986.

i've got a 1.3 athlon duron you could have for cheap.
i don't know if it works because the previous owner broke his computer into little bits so i had to bend the pins back
oh yea i also have some memory (same p.c.)

the reason for his maddness? (other than being an idiot, he destroyed his dvd player and cd burner) seems he had an old 500mb drive compressed gee i just love stupid people

How cheap? What kind of RAM? PM or email my wife. Mr. Shaper

i can build a pc for under that. i built alice a 1600 athlonXP, 128mb 1600DDR, and a gforce4 440mx for 350. and that would be even cheaper now. i have a few extra parts laying around i can throw in extra cheep. (including possibly a liteon cdburner) i am looking for an exuse to upgrade anyway. pm me and i will give you exact prices. also, if you do decide to get a dell i know several coupon codes and can get you a 100-200$ off.

Actually I broke down and bought a TV and Vader is helping me out with a system, what I am looking for is a hard drive, 4Gb to 20Gb or so for the XP OS, I'd prefer to save my old hard drive because quite a huge chunk of data there is irreplaceable

Cool! Glad you got a hook up. I have a 20gb drive that I've had since 98. It runs perfect, has no bad sectors but is only a 5400rpm drive (don't remember if they made anything faster back then with the exception of SCSI drives). Dunno what I'd charge for it. if you want it. make me an offer.

As for the someone building a system under $350. Well that is doable but don't expect to run anything but Windows 98 with only 128mb of ram. It's 512mb (or more) or nothing if you're running XP. And since support for 98 has gone bye bye XP is your only choice MS wise. 256mb is the bare minimum I'd run XP on and even then I'd be adding more soon after.

But hey! thanks for trying to undercut my price!-Mr. Shaper

hmm I can grab a 20GB 7200rpm for $33, we'll have to see how much money I have left after all this is said and done, but I might be willin to take that off yer hands LS