[masraum]

I recommended Dells because I worked at a place where everyone had 2 PC's on their desk connected to two different networks. THere was about 150 of us. All of the PC's were Dells. There were two other floors in our building for our company, all of the people on those two floors also used Dells. In 3 years we had very few issues. Actually, I had no issues, but I know that from time to time stuff must have broke. And all of these people were at least a little technical with admin rights, so there were all different kinds of software being installed and uninstalled.

I once worked someplace with Compaq computers and once worked someplace where I did some support for people with Gateway computers. Both of those were crap. That was years ago, things may have changed, but like I said. I've been around lots and lots of Dell PC's that ran like a top.

They are right though. a bunch of RAM and hard drive space will get you buy. The potential problems with the upgrade route are that a lot of times the older motherboards are limited in what sort of upgrades that you can do. The memory used by your old motherboard [i]MAY[i] be hard to find and actually more expensive than newer, faster, larger memory because it's nearly obsolete. I ran into that problem when I was ready to upgrade from my old celeron 300 that was overclocked to 450Mhz. The motherboard would only support PC100 memory and at the time that was more expensive than faster newer memory.

Good luck. Let us know what you decide and how it turns out.