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I’ll sure let you know. It may be a while as I haven’t yet decided whether I really want to do this or stick with WinXP for a little longer.

I’ve been looking at combo kits at Newegg and Tigerdirect. Any other suggestions? My concern with Tiger direct is that most everything in the kit is OEM. They claim that the only difference is in the packaging. Based on past (bad) experience, I don’t believe it.

Thanks for the good information. It looks like APUs are here to stay. For my purposes, it looks like the way to go. Also, after posting my question, I found out that the AMD APU will work with a discrete GPU add-on card should I decide later that I need one .

Last night I did some more looking and found this among others that are similar:
http://www.tigerdirect.com/applications/SearchTools/item-details.asp?EdpNo=2054873&CatId=332
Gigabyte has been around a long time. I guess they are good. Specs indicate a lot of room to expand/update. My existing AMD Athlon has run for almost 10 years with no problem. The Athlon II x3 445 looks like it has more than adequate processing power for my needs, at least, for now. Seagate 500GB is good. 8GB of memory is good. I don’t know much about the rest but assume they are adequate. I checked prices of individual components and it appears that the kit is about $100 cheaper. Does anyone see any shortcomings or any missing components? Any other comments?

Last night I was perusing the internet looking at barebones kits. I found a couple that look very interesting. I may have some questions later. I’ve got more looking to do. I like the concept of a kit that includes everything I need and components that are known to work together properly. I hope that’s not to much of an assumption. One I was looking at appeared to have “middle of the road” components which did not totally tax the MB capacity. So, there was room for future expansion/update. It looks like this method will result in a better performing machine at a lower cost than even the cut-rate machines sold at the office supply stores or online.

Thanks for all the good comments.

As I stated, I have read a number of user reviews and, of those, most are unclear when it comes to ease of installation unless there are problems. So, I’m asking for advice here.

I only mentioned Asus because of the good luck I had with it 10 years ago. Based on these comments, I may stick with Asus. I hadn’t considered a bare-bones system but may do so as I get more into this.

I’m a little confused about what you say about IDE. One of you says it’s gone and another says there are still connections. I suppose it varies from mb to mb? I’ll watch for that. I hate to give up perfectly good drives. Also, I have a relatively new DVD drive that I added to the existing system just a couple of years ago.

I understand that MS will be supporting XP through 2014 (or is it 2013?) but I have an unused CD of Win7 that I plan to put into a new build. So, it should be good for the foreseeable future.

Thanks again