HP Pavilion Media Center m7250n (Pentium D 820 2.8 GHz)

Summary: This computer come to my family as a "broken" machine. In reality, the previous user's HDD had crashed prompting her to buy a new computer. I slapped a 1.5TB drive into the machine, installed W7 Ultimate, and I was off and running. It seems to work a-okay for a 6 year old computer. I found DDR2 RAM refurbished for very cheap, so I maxed out the 4gb limit. Understandably, since I had already installed Window x86 (32bit) so the last gb of space is addressed to other areas so only 3gb are recognized. I mostly use the machine as a media and file server via SMB within a mostly Unix environment. Although I had a couple compatibility issues, it ended up working just fine. It is certainly fast enough for the minimum tasks I expect of it. But it should be noted that I am not a gamer of any kind, so the 128mb video card is more than enough. I only wish that there had been another PCIe slot for USB 3.0, or onboard video so that I could remove the video card and free up the only PCIe. But considering the price I paid for this machine, I guess I cannot complain too much. In any case, I would advise not paying too much for this computer, but don't turn it down if the price is right.

Summary: the most reliable and least annoyingly-bugged pc i have ever seen- and it still overpowers most pcs in performance even today!