i got a 2001 hp, and side by side with a 2003 dell, it beats it hands down.. its a pretty nice pc too, but it could be better. but i gotta say the customer service is excellent. they even sent me a recovery disk(all 3 of em) and all i had to pay was shipping. Dont get me wrong, it has a pentium 3 ~ 1.0ghz and can outpreform some of the 1.5ghz celerons, but the only downside is it can only take up to 512 mb of ram. but with 2 128mb cards in it, it sped it up even faster than with a 256, or a 256 and a 128. the onboard graphics are acceptinal, but it is really better to upgrade. the only thing u need to do to those is wipe the hd and do a clean install of xp r whatever it takes
On the other hand, i had a 2002 dell optiplex that worked great(pen3 @ 1600mhz) that i loved because it was a fast machine(could beat alot of macines that ran about 2.0ghz). but when they dezigned the pc, i guess they were in a rush, and guess what? they messed up on the mobo. i had it for about 3 months and it went kaput and the clock went crazy(1 min took about 3 seconds), so i called up dell and they diagnosed it was the mobo. they sent me the same model one(had to pay for it, cost + shipping) and had best buy put it in, and after about 3 weeks it messed up again. so after that i gave up on it, and when the mobo went out again it took the ps with it. dell's service is about par, but hp's service is better in my opinion