The dells arent bad, as long as you dont get one with the leaky caps and maxtor drives in them. The only real problems we ever had with the dells at my old job was bad boards and hard drives. At least it was easy to get parts for them. We'd just go to the website and enter what part we needed and how we determined it was faulty, and next day we had a new part.
Sounds like ALMOST as much fun as the "back up" PC I was using for a while..... 900 MHz Celeron, not sure about RAM.... The PSU puts out interference too, cause distortions in the CRT monitor that is about 3 feet away.
Thats not the compact design. Thats the fullsized desktop case. I worked on those hunks of **** for over 3 years. The one thing i will say for them, they can take a fall. We were moving a lab and about 15 of them slid off the cart dropping a good 3-4 feet and every single one of em booted up after we put em back together.