Our PC went up in smoke

I've done that which I hoped never to do - bought a PC with Windows Vista on it. Our eMachines went up in smoke after 2.5 years. We needed something quick and cheap. I didn't feel like going through the effort of converting to the Mini Mac. There's a familiarity with Windows that's hard to give up and we own a lot of expensive software for Windows already. Visula Studio .Net and Office 2003 are quite expensive and I got them from UI before graduating for $20 because of their super student deals with Microsoft. I do have Linux on the PC, too, but Juno doesn't support it and I only really like it for writing code.

I found Vista to be absolutely obnoxious for about an hour. The first bootup took forever and the annoying notifications and menus were all on by default. I just went bit by bit and turned everything back to the "Classic" mode so that it basically looks just like XP now. Everything is a little flashier and prettier, but I can't see anything that really changed functionally yet. Everything is roughly where it used to be.

Anyway, we got a Compaq for $325 that has a 120GB SATA HD, 512MB PC4200 DDR2 (soon to be 1.5GB for $40 more), DVD burner with Lightscribe, an open PCI express slot, 3.33 GHz Celeron, and my old 80GB IDE HD with XP and Linux and all our important files. All it really needs to become a good home PC is a nice video card for that PCI express slot.