>It's worth it. There's a lot of good stuff in it.
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>>It's been a long time coming but that's great news.
>>I'm thinking of getting a Win 8.1 machine and that will push me a bit.

Thanks to all who replied. I wound up with a great deal on eBay ($720) taking your recommendations into account. Acer desktop with I7, 16 GB of memory, 2 GB hard drive, 24 GB SSD. You can get much bigger SSDs but I am going to use this as a development machine and it is plenty for that. Craig, I will go with your advice of using just MSE and Windows Defender. All my other apps will remain on the current machine so if the new one takes it in the shorts it won't be the end of the world.

And I will get to see for myself what the big bad Windows 8 is all about....