Intel Celeron D VS AMD Sempron VS Pentium 4

Actually I bought that box last week as an emergency replacement for a box in my office. It has performed well but I only use it for mainstream business apps. I consider it a good bargain so far.

It has a 3100 Sempron (better than a Celeron, not as good as an AthlonXP or Pentium 4), onboard shared video and I believe an empty AGP slot (I hope to never need to know for the use I have for this machine). It has several open bays but unless Compaq has changed since being bought by HP you are dealing with a proprietary Compaq motherboard-chipset and (generally barely adequate) proprietary power supply. Hence expandability is limited no matter how many empty bays the box may have. It should not be a problem to add a hard drive but be prepared for surprises.

If you want to play hi end 3-d games with all the eye candy, edit video at a reasonable speed or work in large files with Photoshop you get the best performance from upper end Athlon XP (these are being phased out), P4 and (my choice) Athlon64 cpus, a large amount of fast memory and a high end 3d video card. Computer prices are dropping like a stone but the high end is still pricey. Lower end cpus have less on board cache, slower buses, work with slower memory. However none of these things really matter for mainstream computer uses and most people would get adequate performance for what they do with a 200mHz PIII if WindowsXP wasn't such a bloated sow of an OS.