My beautiful Sister-In-Law Rachel wants a new tower (she has the LCD monitor w/VGA, mouse and keyboard). Her budget is $300 and it would be a PLUS if this is a new rig. While you and I might consider 'used' or 'refurbished', chicks dig-it more if it is new! Windows Vista (NOT Basic) is a PLUS, but XP is quite acceptable. In fact, Rachel had no knowledge of Vista! I would really like to get her into a Vista rig with all of it's beautiful Aero-Glass, if that is possible. Other than that, nothing fancy as she is only a web-surfer. Can you give me some links? Thanks!

You can probably have a couple of different picks for $300 from tigerdirect if you are willing to go refurbished. I've seen a few emachines that weren't too bad in the $250-300 range that had decent specs. if you are close by and can set things up for her you might try a barebones kit and see what you can piece together for the $300. I have seen some pretty nice barebone deals from tigerdirect where for $200- $300 you got pretty much everything sans a video card and operating system. i only mention tiger  direct cause I get like 2 emails from them per week with their specials.

I just built a rig for a coworker for $320 with windows vista home premium about 3 months ago. I was a core2 based pentium a gig of ram 160gig HD and a cheap gpu cant remember the exact one. She didn't play games but it was fine for aero. If you do some bargain hunting I'm sure you can cut the other $20 off. I'll look around when I get off work.

it might be cheeper to look in the stores and see what they have. but i know you can make one with a CD2 2gigs of ram and a vista happy vid card for 300 no problem

CPU  even zippy enough for some gaming

Board micro board has 4 ram slots, onboard gfx and pcie 16x

RAM cheap, but solid and has heat spreaders

PSU cheap, but loox decent for basic PC

Case mini tower that loox like it could fit full size GFX

burner basic IDE

HDD 160gb, 16mb cache

Grand total w/ tax & shipping is $355

I know that's over budget, but I hope my suggestions will at least give you some ideas.

Super Dave:

My beautiful Sister-In-Law Rachel wants a new tower (she has the LCD monitor w/VGA, mouse and keyboard). Her budget is $300 and it would be a PLUS if this is a new rig. While you and I might consider 'used' or 'refurbished', chicks dig-it more if it is new! Windows Vista (NOT Basic) is a PLUS, but XP is quite acceptable. In fact, Rachel had no knowledge of Vista! I would really like to get her into a Vista rig with all of it's beautiful Aero-Glass, if that is possible. Other than that, nothing fancy as she is only a web-surfer. Can you give me some links? Thanks!

 

 Barebones kit here:  If this will help!  http://www.tigerdirect.com/applications/SearchTools/item-details.asp?EdpNo=3947466&Sku=P450-9108%20C

I want to thank you guys for your feedback! Whilst looking around for the right rig, Rachel's husband saw a deal at Fry's and bought it: eMachines T3656 w/Celeron D440, 1GB memory, 160GB SATA hd, DVD burner w/Label Flash, a bundled Epson CX-7450 multi-function printer, and Vista Basic for $249.98. Amazingly, he didn't even have to do the mail-in rebate thing!

I actually told him to avoid Celeron processors and Vista Basic, but he got them anyway. Oh well, he and his wife like it, but I really think she would have liked Vista's Aero-Glass better, which is not available in Basic. $249.98 is smokin' dirt-cheap, though!

Celeron

Oh well... as long as they're happy with it!

its not the best but its only 249 so who cares.... its still a PC

 If it isn't too late PLEEEEASE tell them to get an extended warranty on the rig.... eMachines are notorious for going through mobos like a sweaty kid goes through socks.......

I can contest to that.

ice91785:

 If it isn't too late PLEEEEASE tell them to get an extended warranty on the rig.... eMachines are notorious for going through mobos like a sweaty kid goes through socks.......

I think eMachines got a bum-rap on that! There were a lot of motherboards that failed due to bad capacitors, and eMachines wasn't the only company that got burned (Gateway comes to mind). I have replaced mobos on both brands due to this, but those computers were manufactured years ago, and the offending motherboards were MSI (eMachines does NOT manufacture it's own motherboards). It is sad that eMachines earned such a bad reputation because of this.

Way-back in the mid-1980's Hyundai manufactured a very stylish small-car called the EXCEL. That car was Hyundai's entrance into the US market. At that time I remember seeing lots of those things on the road, and they were garnering rave reviews! A couple of years later, though, Hyundai was on-the-ropes because of poor-reliabilty. But things have changed for Hyundai, and their new-car ratings are quite good. A bad reputation is hard to shake, and eMachines has earned a bad reputation. I hope things have turned-around for eMachines now that the bad-cap episode is over!