ANy suggestions on building a comp for $500 or less?

My wife's cheap ass boss want's to spend $500 or less on a comp, I told her E-Machine or I could try to build one.

You could build it with shitty used parts; buy used, or buy a shit brand like an emachine/hp/compaq...

I hear AOL has some thing for $250 but I think it requires like a 2 year AOL subscription

Yeah AOL has a dell, and dell does have a desktop package for $499 but she doesn't want dell because you have to send it in for service, but it don't matter to me, I am just trying to help out because of the politics of the situation (wife's boss).

I think this would be perfect for what she needs

Dude It\'s A Dell

It's strictly for homework, email, and surfing.

lol, just get a dell; i mean comeon, how often will you really service it... just give it to me and buy a new one...

You laugh, but she brought over her compaq and asked if i could tune it up for her. I said sure let me look at it. Then I saw it right there on the front so proud this compaq was of it's shiny new usb ports right next to the SERIAL PORT....on the front of the box.....I said you know it's time to get a new comp and let me keep this one as a linux box, lol.

Ick, Stay away from E-Machines, they royally suck. My now wife bought one before we got together and it is/was horrible. Barely enough mem to run Win XP Home. Plus it shares what little memory it has is shared with the video. I've ran several OS's on it, even Win98se and it was slow as hell for an AMD 1GHz. It takes forever to boot and to load programs. Logging into it takes forever even with minimal load settings and minimal graphics.
Then comes support. Forget about it. I had to SE the techie to get information about the hardware inside. The guy basically told me that he hoped that no one was listening to this call or he'd lose his job. I snooped around in the box and couldn't get any clear indication of what the Hardware specs were. Plus they don't give you OEM stuff they give you a "restore disk".
And if you want to use it for games, even /simple/ games, like older win games, forget about it. The graphics sucks on it.
But I suppose if you wanted to use a minimal memory usage OS, ie Linux, then you might be able to load pine for emailing.

I hate emachines, they're slow, cheap, and overall not worth it... people should just pay me to build pc's; their nice ...

Then again i do like when i get donations of old shitty emachines and other pc's, part some, put fbsd/fedora/slack on 'em, there ya go...