I must agree with allen, at very least *consider* a Dell. HP's still scare me. I had one about 5 years back, and ever since I first pulled it out of the box I had nothing but trouble with it. From Win95 (at the time) crashing 2 minutes after fully booting up, to the CD-ROM drive dying after being used no more than 15 times, to mysteriously loosing the himem.sys file (and rendering the comp. temporarily useless), I went mail order and never looked back. Granted all this was 5 years ago and they could have gotten better since then, but I still haven't touched them since.

Another thing to consider when purchasing a computer is service and tech support. Any store-bought box is going to have to be shipped out if anything goes wrong with it in order to *not* void the warranty. This can probably take a while...much longer than I'd be willing to wait. I had a Quantex box (mail order), which worked fine until I started ****ing with it, that, when the modem crapped out, Airborne Expressed me a new one the next day. Unfortunatley they're now out of business, but I'm sure Dell does the same. I haven't had any hardware problems with my Dell yet. Also, check to see if you'll be able to understand your tech support folks if you ever need to call them. Last I checked, Compaq's is done out of India. My roommate once called them for help and didn't get anywhere because he couldn't understand them. Now, I've got nothing against the Indians, more of the one's I've met are very bright, just the language barrier can be tough sometimes, especially in a stressful situation like trying to fix a busted PC.

Just some extra thoughts...and if you have the know-how, don't rule out building one yourself either.

alpha