[quiet mike]

Well from my understanfing you are buying a factory made computer, not self built.

AMD will come in 4 months with a new Athlon based on the Hammer core which will be 32bit and 64bit compatible, wich is supposebly 20% better at equal speeds with current XP chips and cooler. I personally am waiting for them because as seen now, as son as a new technological advances are intoduces, people take use of it, so 64bit programs are going to show up pretty soon.

Pentiums have a new northbridge core which allows for 533MHz FSB compared to the 400 in previous P4 and 133 in P3 and lower. But they run much hoter then the previous P4 and cost at least 3 times more than an Athlon that can keep up with it.

At a store most computers will be Pentium based and on the old 400MHz FSB not the newer 533MHz FSB. Also most come with either crapy video card or a good video card but then everything else crappy.

If you buy from HSN or As Seen on TV, you will find a lot of excelent deals. Most of these PC's are Athlon based and have too much software of which you need almost none. But they have ususlly good video card and they are made for upgradability. The problem is that they are bundeled with monitors, scaner, printers, speacker and other stuff which you might not need since you already have from the old computer.


The way to go is self built, which I will do in spring. If you can wait and your dad will allow you, do wait to see how the ne AMD Athlons and Pentiums will do and then buy those, or get one that you can get today but at half the price because of the introduction of the newere chips.

If you do go self built comeback here since there are a few guys that know about it, and I myself I am studying, getting ready for my first built.