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No! Never buy HP. Junk. Junk. Junk. The company would be gone if they weren't surviving on their give the printer razor for free, charge for the blade cartridges.

HP and Compaq did us a favor by merging. It used to be difficult to decide who made the worst PC, HP or Compaq. Now, we know for sure --- Both!.

I've never owned an Emachine but my buddy likes them. They aren't as good as Dell.

My advice: Buy a Dell. XP Home is fine. At least 384 MB RAM. Any hard drive is good. Word Perfect is as good as the MS products and costs much less.

If you want to be adventurous, buy a used machine on Ebay but you will have to put software on yourself. I bought Pentium III / 1 GHz Dells for less than $100 each (no monitor) a year ago. Companies sell them when they upgrade so you can get a good price.

Be very careful what you let you kids pull off the internet, such as tool bars and free applications. Even the best machine is brought to it's knees by the junk.

The virus thing is overblown. Be careful, keep your patches up, run your anti-virus, and you're more likely to lose your data by you accidently deleting it than a hacker getting you (by a long shot).