One thing about Compaq that I did not like was the feel of the keyboards a very minor but extremely irritating point actually.
I'm sure I'm going to pick up a new Gateway machine in early December and come January (no doubt!!) something even better will be on offer with a faster GPU for the same cash...😉
Still, the Gateway/Emachines options are pretty good overall.
If you want to cut costs, check out the Gateway (7xxx) on offer at CompUSA which is a stripped down version of the M68xx series with 256MB RAM.
I'm all out for a DVD burner now though.