The HP A1720N is overall a well-designed minitower PC. Strengths Memory (1GB standard) is expandable to 4GB (4 slots). Many similar machines top out at 2GB. Lots of I/O - 7 HSB 2 oorts (not used by mnuse/KB, which are PS/2), and 2 FireWire ports. Surround sound and digital sound I/O. Hidden recovery partition. Lots of special function keys on keyboard. DVD+-RW is dual layer and supports Lightscribe. Windows Vista Home Premium - much more secure than XP and includes multimedia features. Weaknesses Onboard graohics are not the fastest (there are expansion slots, so an upgrade is possible). Power supply is only 250 watts No recovery DVDs - you run a program to create them. Windows Vista - User Account Control is intrusive and there are compatibility issues with older hardware and software. This worked out well for me. My old desktop was obsolete. I might have bought a Mac, I have a Macbook, but their desktop offerings are a strange lot, the Mini underpowered and hard to expand, the iMac having a built in monitor I don't need, and the Mac Pro very expensive. If they made something like an Intel version of the old Power Macs, I would have gotten that. As is, this suits mhy purposes. I wanted to learn Vista, needed a more modern PC, and I wanted to use it for music, the FireWire and digital I/O features were important.