HP Pavilion a700n Desktop PC (Athlon XP 3000+, 512 MB RAM, 80 GB Hard Drive, DVD/CD-RW Drive)

Rating:
Summary: Very Good
Review: The HP Pavillion is a very good computer. It is moderately fast, has a good sized hard drive and plenty of RAM. Also it has a lot of USB ports (7) and two firewire ports. Why four stars and not five? The first one I had blew after 2-3 weeks but the new one has been fine for 3 months.

Rating:
Summary: good value AMD machine
Review: [...] Cheap! HP's reputation for quality is less than stellar, so I took the thing home and tried to kill it. Ran it all night every night for a week running multiple sessions of MS Access, playing streaming audio from the web and running a slide show from three drives (one an external USB hard drive) using several hundred images of 1-2MB each, changing every second. The CPU cooling fan ran full time. Hard drive and CD both ran almost constantly. Machine did not miss a beat. Two months later, it still works fine.

On the downside, I spent HOURS cleaning pre-installed junk software off the thing. Freed up several gigabytes of hard drive. I guess at the price, HP's only chance to make a buck is through fees from software vendors.