I have not seen so much of a savings by building your own computer in price but upgradeability, proformace, and quality of parts. The companies who build computers do so many with so little profit margin that they "slap" together as many of them as they can to get it to make money. So i have seen many computers even Dell that have not been worth the money spent. Also a lot of the parts used are proprietary or intergraded parts so an upgrade is extremely difficult to accompish. As far as free programs go depending on what she is going to need the list sounds real good but i did not see a word processing program on it. Sun has there version of Star Office for free download at http://www.sun.com/download/ it is suppose to work just a well as microsoft (with a few bugs) and even has support to save in a format that microsoft word can read. I have tried it and it seems to work real well from what i could tell. It comes with a word, spread sheet and a couple of other programs. Bradley Marden [log in to unmask] "Hold No Punches.." Rode brings you great shareware/freeware programs with his honest opinions in this weekly column. http://freepctech.com/rode