I know you're trying to stick to a budget, but for $25-$30 more you can replace the old and busted AXP 1800+ with the new hotness of a 2500+ that has a faster system bus and twice the L2 cache. Plus, if you get tempted to spend a little extra cash on PC2700 RAM, you might as well go for a processor that has a matching system bus so both the RAM speed and Frontside Bus Speed are both at 166 MHz DDR, since the NF2 boards run a bit faster when everything is in sync. I think you'll find the extra money worth it in the end.
It's nice to stick with a budget, especially with your kid's computers that aren't gonna be used for more than the Net and the Sims, and you don't want mission creep to set in and suddenly find yourself taking out a second mortage to pay for a new 3.4 GHz Hyperthreaded beast with liquid cooling and glowing neon lights. Right now, though, there really is a lot of really nice stuff piled up on the low end of the price range, especially since AMD is making the big transition to the A64 platform and the old stuff is priced to sell. Budgeting in an extra $50 or $100 on the project will actually make a pretty decent difference in overall performance if you spend a little bit extra here and there on just the right items (like going up a processor generation from a t-bred to a barton, or going from a 2MB cache hard drive to an 8MB hard drive).
Also, if you're willing to tie up some cash in a rebates for about 3-4 months, you can probably upgrade that hard drive to a 80GB or 120GB for the same money that you are spending on the 40GB. The rebates are a pain to deal with, but they really help bring the cost of the hard drives down. I just got back some rebates on my hard drive that knocked the cost of my Western Digital 120 SE down to $60. Just as you can never be too rich or too thin (except for Paris Hilton, that is), you likewise can never, ever have too much hard drive space. Especially if you have a mini DV camcorder and the kids want to start burning DVDs of their home movies when the DVD burner prices come down. Officemax has been running what seems like a weekly hard drive deal for the past month or so, and if you can lay your hands on some OM coupons somehow (my wife brings them home from her office all the time) you can probably make the deals a bit hotter. Assuming you can actually find a store that has the drives in stock, that is.
It's nice to stick with a budget, especially with your kid's computers that aren't gonna be used for more than the Net and the Sims, and you don't want mission creep to set in and suddenly find yourself taking out a second mortage to pay for a new 3.4 GHz Hyperthreaded beast with liquid cooling and glowing neon lights. Right now, though, there really is a lot of really nice stuff piled up on the low end of the price range, especially since AMD is making the big transition to the A64 platform and the old stuff is priced to sell. Budgeting in an extra $50 or $100 on the project will actually make a pretty decent difference in overall performance if you spend a little bit extra here and there on just the right items (like going up a processor generation from a t-bred to a barton, or going from a 2MB cache hard drive to an 8MB hard drive).
Also, if you're willing to tie up some cash in a rebates for about 3-4 months, you can probably upgrade that hard drive to a 80GB or 120GB for the same money that you are spending on the 40GB. The rebates are a pain to deal with, but they really help bring the cost of the hard drives down. I just got back some rebates on my hard drive that knocked the cost of my Western Digital 120 SE down to $60. Just as you can never be too rich or too thin (except for Paris Hilton, that is), you likewise can never, ever have too much hard drive space. Especially if you have a mini DV camcorder and the kids want to start burning DVDs of their home movies when the DVD burner prices come down. Officemax has been running what seems like a weekly hard drive deal for the past month or so, and if you can lay your hands on some OM coupons somehow (my wife brings them home from her office all the time) you can probably make the deals a bit hotter. Assuming you can actually find a store that has the drives in stock, that is.
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