I like a_hollow_year's suggestion to build your compy better, bigger, stronger, faster, but if you want to buy new, I'll tell you that Vista ain't all that bad. It uses up a lot of memory, so I put in a stick of 1GB RAM when I bought my laptop (bringing it to 1GB and 512 MB). It doesn't take a terrible amount of getting used to. My parents work it out fine, and they're fairly illiterate. You can get a decent eMachines at Best Buy for $400-500, since you already like your monitor.