Reply #1: This is refurbished?

[RoyGBiv]

I should note up front that I have a huge bias against Compaqs. I've encountered far too many problems with various Compaq machines, and fixing them can be a nightmare. No other mass produced assembler brand has given me the same level of trouble, not even Gateway.

That out of the way ...

Find out what part of it is refurbished. If it's the hard drive or power supply, be aware you'll probably be replacing it in less than a year, so figure that into the potential cost of maintenance. Also, that power supply is incredibly small for a modern machine. You have basically no upgrade capacity and may experience problems if you're doing something that puts a heavy load on it. Of course, some of that depends on the quality of it regardless of the wattage. If it gives stable voltages, you should be fine with what's there.

You say you don't play games, so the video should be okay, but I am not a fan at all of on-board video with shared memory. If you are absolutely certain you will never be doing anything that requires a decent graphics processor, you'll be okay with that.

Just for the sake of comparison, I recently built a machine with almost those same specs (slightly smaller hard drive and a 2800+ processor, but better graphics) for about $475. This was with all new parts, a low-end but independent graphics card with 128M of memory, a retail license for Windoze XP w/ SP2 (more expensive than a OEM version), and it includes my markup for labor.

Basically, if what you have now does everything you want except for it being really slow, then this should be fine and is a decent price, not great, but decent.

OnEdit: Do you know if the AGP slot is 4x or 8x? It doesn't matter really if you're not worried about the graphics, but if it is 4x only, it'll indicate age.