Keep looking. After you add memory and hard disk (you can easily accomodate household usage and web browsing on 3 gig, but the kids will chew through that in hours loading their cds) you don't have an economically priced system. Plus, the old video architecure would yield poor game performance. My brother had me set up for his 3 children a second-hand Gateway with a p-II 300 slot 1 processor, 64 meg ram, 16 meg AGP 3d video, 24x cdrom, (no burner) and a 10 gig hard drive. The only upgrade it needed was a 100 network card so it can share the printer attached to his pc, which has all the bells and whistles. It is super for homework, and even provides some entertainment, since the video is robust enough for many of their games. That's the system you're looking for. Unless you get it practically for free, stick with a Compaq, Dell, HP, etc major brand that comes with manuals, one-click recovery cd, web-site support for drivers, etc. Tom Turak -----Original Message----- From: Eric Johnson [mailto:[log in to unmask]] Sent: Friday, April 19, 2002 11:46 AM To: [log in to unmask] Subject: [PCBUILD] Advice on used computer? Hello, Wonder if I can ask for any advice or experiences with the following system that has been offered to me for about 150 dollars sans monitor. Mobo: MB748LMRT, I think the brand is Xcel 2000, system chips are SiS 620 by pcchips. It has a 300 MHz celeron in the slot 1 and also a 370 socket (not real sure about the terms, etc. here so bear with me). From searching the web, it seems that this will hold up to a PIII at 500. Any idea how much this processer should cost used? It comes with 32 MB memory, 8 of which is shared for onboard video. That'll probably have to go up to at least 64, no? Seems to have a decent sound system but the onboard modem seems to be fried. It has a modem card in it but was not configured (or doesn't work) when I looked it over briefly. The HD is a 3.2 GB fujitsu. Win98SE is installed and loads slowly - probably memory related? Perhaps putting Win95 on it would be better. I'm looking for something cheap for the kids to play with and basic inet connection and easy sorts of stuff, etc. I'm willing to work out a few kinks but what I don't want is a can of worms or continual time-draining headaches in keeping it running. What do you suggest? Thanks in advance, Eric _________________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Get your free @yahoo.com address at http://mail.yahoo.com The NOSPIN Group is now offering Free PC Tech support at our newest website: http://freepctech.com PCBUILD maintains hundreds of useful files for download visit our download web page at: http://freepctech.com/downloads.shtml