In my line of work I come across a range of computers. Working with companies across the south I usually recommend Hewlett Packard machines when organising a roll-out, or even for individual purchases.
The reason for this is because they are very solid. Hewlett Packard spends a great deal of time developing these machines and they're very very reliable.
I recently worked with the UK office of a world-wide health and fitness company. The project was to provide new machines for their till's and sales computers for all of the clubs across the UK. A list of machines was put together and the DX2000MT was chosen.
It's a mini tower P4 2.8Gig, with 512 meg Ram and 40gig Hard drive. Expansion is easy. 4 USB 2.0 sockets on the back and 2 on the front. With it's screwless case it's easy to get into, but I must say that the machine is more reliable kept as standard. I added a video capture card to a DX2000MT and the machine became very unstable.
The Onboard network card is very good. Unlike some of the cheaper motherboards where you will find it necessary to buy a seperate Network card, this 10/100 NIC by Intel is very fast and dependable. The onboard sound is about the same as any. If you are big into your sound you would normally have a high end sound card anyway.
It doesn't come with a CD/DVD Writer, but it is designed as a desktop business machine and it comes with a 52x CD Rom drive. It costs peanuts to buy a CD/DVD writer and it's five minutes to fit it, so not an expensive option.
The graphics card surprised me. It's actually not bad at all for a standard onboard jobby. Again, if you're big into games/high end multimedia/graphic production then you would be using a decent graphics card, but there again you probably wouldn't have selected this machine if that was your bag.
Looks wise, it's pretty easy on the eye. With it's black case, silver front and trendy curves and vents it looks professional. These machines range from £300ish for the Celeron version and £400ish for the Pentium 4 version (I'd go with the P4).
Support is very good from HP. When buying one from an HP Authorised dealer you will get a years onsite warrantee.
Overall, this is a good PC and you won't have many problems.
More details
Reliability
Excellent
Memory / capacity
Good
Range of Extra Features
Satisfactory
Instruction manual
Good
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