There's alot comp. gurus here. Looking for a decent computer for home use/gaming under $1k with monitor.
Not sure which brand to get. Have a dell p400 with is still doing fine. Can any1 recommend a good manufacture?

Dell? Gateway???

I have a Dell Laptop for work and a HP Pavilion pc at home, very happy with the HP, bought from Circuit City about 8 months ago for about what you want to spend it has 2.08 GHz AMD Athlon XP Processor 512 mb DDR SDRAM 120 GB Hard Drive with CD-RW etc. we down load lots of pictures off our digital camera copy CD's etc. plenty of power and memory. Can play games etc. Very Happy with it

If you know someone with even minor skills, its cheaper to buy your own and assemble it with parts from Fries. My friend built me a top o the line system for 500 bucks (no monitor).

They even have "for dummies" books onrolling your own.

David

I like to say that computers are like houses, get the best you can afford. You say you are going to use it for gaming, and have a budget of a grand. Some video cards will eat up half of your budget.

What games do you play? Are you a hard-core computer user, or just the occasional piddle around once or twice a week?

One suggestion I might give you is, and ive done this with most of my relatives. Go to a place like newegg.com and get a "bare bones kit". Then transfer your memory and hard drive, and cdrom over and you have a faster computer. Of course you will have to reload your Operating system again, but then that makes completely new. The money you will save will let you buy a bigger hard drive, dvd burner, jake raby engine, nickies, etc.

No question. Buy a Mac. Oh, gaming, nevermind. Brand doesn't matter graphics card's important.

Bob,

Ordinarily I would agree with you...

Except he wants to play games and there are way more games available on the PC.

David

Yeah, I saw that and edited. They're right about building it yourself. If you just want more power and performance, and the case you have now will accept it, you can get a new motherboard, and a high performance graphics card, pull the old ones (wear a ground strap) and pop in the new. You'll be good to go. Or, you can build a new one from scratch. All it takes is a screw driver, and someone who knows where things plug in. Not tough at all.