Seems very expensive for what you're getting.

Why this computer?

I run an Z68+Ivy Bridge system with Windows XP. Fortunately Gigabyte for one still offered all necessary drivers. The most difficult part is adding the AHCI driver, as intel does not supply the driver with an installer. Or use IDE mode instead.

Or do you require XP pre-installed?

That was one of the reasons I was looking at this (XP pre-installed)

I am not afraid of installing XP, but my hardware knowledge is very dated. It I were going to build a system I'd probably go oldschool and build an athlon XP

Note that XP does not come included in the base price, nor does a hard drive. It actually comes out to $570 if you count in the additional stuff, or $535 if you remove the DVD drive entirely. And that's not counting shipping. That is fucking ridiculous for a 5 year old machine with the cheapest possible parts...

To put things in perspective, here's some random shit I slapped together at one of my favored vendors... keep in mind I limited it to a machine that comes with a copy of XP, and I didn't shop around at all, so this is certainly not the best price that can be had:

A refurbished Lenovo, with XP included - $159.99
Upgrade it to 2GB of RAM, with two 1GB sticks - $29
Also add a much faster processor - $53
A terabyte hard drive to replace the old 80GB - $89
And, how about a better video card too, because why the fuck not - $42

That's $373 total. Add in about $30 for the shipping (assuming you're in NC as your username would imply), and you're still coming out with a much better computer for over $130 cheaper than that other machine. If you went with current-gen parts and tracked down a copy of XP separately, you could do even better for a similar price.

ncmark wrote:

I am not afraid of installing XP, but my hardware knowledge is very dated.

It did get simpler since. Still time flies when messing with a system you are not yet familiar with. Mostly because of software though (BIOS/Drivers/OS...), connecting the hardware is pretty straightforward.

This machine is already outdated and seriously overpriced. Just build a box yourself, I'm sure people here would be more than happy to spec it, and even the lower end Pentium chips now wipe the floor with Core2Duo's.

if I build myself I will probably go Athlon with ASUS a7v333/400 - I already have two of those boards, and I like them.

Just a few weeks ago I retired my A7V600 with Duron 3000+. No complaints about that one. But the earlier MSI KT4V used too much power: It cannot apply CPU Halt/StpGnt without halving the harddisk throughput.