Sony VGC-RB44G

Trendy gave me a new desktop for my birthday. We got a Sony Vaio VGC-RB44G. It is a major upgrade from my aging Vaio laptop. We also got a Samsung 23" LCD as our monitor. Check out the new system's specs:

• Intel® Pentium® 4 Processor 640 with HT Technology
(3.2GHz, 2MB L2 Cache)

• Microsoft® Windows® XP Media Center Edition 2005

• 1GB PC-3200 400MHz DDR RAM

• 250GB 7200rpm Serial ATA Hard Drive

• ATI 128MB Radeon® X300 Graphics Card

• VGA-Out/DVI-D/TV-Outr

• DVD+R Double Layer / DVD±RW

• DVD-ROM

• Multi-Media Card Reader

• Six USB 2.0 (two front/four rear)

• Remote Control/IR Blaster

We chose this Sony over other manufacturers for price ($1,049 after rebate), design, included hardware, and room for expansion. I call our new system the "Big Black Box" because the casing is completely black with black covers hiding the optical drives and media card slots. I love it. It is very different than the casings offered by other major manufacturers. I built a similar system on Dell with 3.0 GHz P4, a smaller hard drive (160 GB), and no remote for the same price.