>Hiya Troops,
>
>Well, I've finally made the decision to upgrade my poor old P200/MMX at home to a newer machine. At this time, I'm in the process of shopping for the new one (mainly on-line). I've already checked out Gateway. Dell's out of the picture because they don't have a line of machines with an Athlon processor (the P4 is not ready for primetime IMO). So the question is this: Do any of you have any recommendations other than these two manufacturers? Any good things to recommend? Any horror stories?
>
>One last note, URL's would be particularly helpful.

I just bought a new Athlon box 2 weeks ago.

Part of my job is spec'ing computers for my clients. For general-purpose computing, it's hard to beat Dell (especially) and its competitors. However, no AMD. (BTW those are my initials, it sure was nice of them to name the company after me).

However, once you get outside the "pre-packaged" solutions, adding extras/accessories costs big $$ (at Dell, anyways). I spent a fair bit of time at www.tomshardware.com and figured out the parts picks I wanted, and I ended up going white-box:

- Asus A7V133 motherboard w/built-in Promise Ultra ATA-100 controller (in addition to standard controller; board supports up to 8 IDE devices)
- Athlon/1000, 512MB PC133 SDRAM
- IBM DeskStar 7200 RPM 46GB ATA-100 hard drive
- AOpen 12x DVD-ROM
- Plextor 12/10/32 CDRW (BURn-Proof)
- Asus 7100 GeForce2 MX w/32MB SDRAM
- Creative Sound Blaster Live! Value
- D-Link 530TX 10/100 full duplex Ethernet card
- MS WheelMouse Optical and Natural Elite keyboard
- W2K Pro OEM

Box was about CAN$2400. I needed to download a Promise driver for W2K from the Asus site to get W2K installed, but that went perfectly (loads as special/SCSI driver in W2K Setup). Machine has been totally stable (knock on wood) over the past 2 weeks.

Others have mentioned Micron. Note that they announced today that they are exiting the PC business.