Something I have also found in my time working with PC's is name brand PC's generally don't perform as well as custom built PC's. HP and Emachines are probably the worst on the market right now.
My aunt recently bought a HP and it has 3 gigs worth of crap on it with a clean install of XP home. Most of it is junk like earthlink, shareware virus scanners, AOL, etc etc. Stat wise it should be about 600megahertz faster with the same amount of ram, although the classic Intel shared 8 meg video card. Anyways just running the internet and XP programs is slower then snot on her PC.
My dad has a Emachine and it was pretty much the same way.
Yea the only thing on it is Windows 2000, Firefox internet browser, and a few games.
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Hi