I bought a Gateway AMD Athlon 800 with a TNT2 32mb video card and 192kRam and a zip drive a year ago for about $1200. It smokes, it ALWAYS works. I can run 2 browsers, 2 spreadsheets, Qcharts, MSWord, QuoteTracker, and my broker's order entry page all at the same time with no lag whatsoever (I do have cable). Bought it off the shelf because I could afford it and I didn't want to deal with it. My son could have used my old case and drives with some new components and come up with an Athlon 900 system for for me for about $400. He's a computer nut. He says that except for running a certain few programs the AMD Athlon is the fastest, the pentium III is second fastest, and the Pentium IIII is actually the slowest because it isn't efficient with most of the currently available software, something about instruction code and L2 cach and operations-per-clock-cycle. It's greek (geek)to me. Intel also uses a different way of naming their P4's so that if they rated it the same way AMD rates theirs, they would call their 1500P4 a 1200P4. They exagerate their speed. Or something. I think.