[jeremiah]

Help, just need some advice I can trust. The guru at the local store wants to sell me a complete unit, the other store wants to sell me what they have on the shelf...one motherboard is it.

[Petronski]

Athlon


No matter what else you do, get an Athlon.

[Petronski]

One other piece of advice I would give you is to get a motherboard with onboard video that can be turned off in BIOS. That way, you can save money now, but expand the video with a sweet card later....if you choose.

[Cedar]

for future reference

[politicket]

ping

[Fire_on_High]

For the love of God, don't go with onboard video. It's slow, steals resources, and cripples performance. For basic browsing and email, even the ancient Genoa Phantom I used in my previous personal machine was an improvement over onboard. A cheap AGP Geforce that's a generation or 2 old but still very servicable for anything but high end games should only set you back around $50 or so.

Try newegg.com for everything...hubby got a very nice video card there recently at a good price, and I've used them in the past to buy cpu upgrades. They ship fast and are very reasonably priced.