Yuck! You bought a pre-made computer? And Compaq of all manufacturers??? It\'s the 21st century, everyone is buying the parts online and putting them together themselves. Saves money and you know what is going on inside. Especially the use of the ide channels, bios options & cooling possibilities. Plus you don\'t get the tons and TONS of utterly useless software (which you pay for) and you yourself can decide which brand of what device to get. Ie- Plextor, Klipsch, Samsung...
Hell maybe it\'s just me and my case of IRC l337n3ss as Regent said. But Compaq?!?!?! At least you got an Athlon which is the way to go nowadays.
For comparison purposes I bought this:
PIII 800EB @ 900
256mb pc133 @ 150
Asus CUSL2
Maxtor 20gig 7200rpm ata/100
Elsa Gladiac 32mb gf2 gts
SBLive! mp3+
Altec Lansing 3-pc speaker set
Pioneer 104s 10xDVD 40xCD
Plextor 8/4/32
Netgear 10/100
Alps 3.5" floppy drive
Zip 100
Micro-i Optical Mouse
Samsung 755DF 1600x1200 .20 dp
Fong Kai 603
PC Power Cooling 275w silencer PS
all for around $1850. And this was back in August of 2000.
Good graphics card for $300: GeForce2 GTS as stated above. Check out arstechnica, anandtech or tomshardware for the latest benchmarks. I bought the Elsa Gladiac because it\'s 32mb version outperformed the 64mb Hercules 3D Prophet in several bm tests. The only reason I\'d buy a Radeon is for the All-In-Wonder model wich does snazzy DV editing.