My son's 11th birthday is coming up. He wants a cell phone but I think he's too young for that and I need him off of mine as I sell on EBAY. His needs would be PC gaming, online gaming, Utube, email and WORD for homework. We have a hughes satelite with a Linksys router. I'd rather do desk top so he can't haul it all over the place as he does my Lap Top but if that makes a difference in $$ - I'll go there. Budget is about 500.00. I would also like to know if refurbished or EBAY purchases are OK in any shape or form. I really appreciate any suggestions as I'm fairly proficient on the Comp itself but choosing processor, RAM, drivers, and all that, I'm clueless about. Lastly, we had Vista removed from my Aspire LT and replaced with XP by the local geeks - so we'd prefer not to have to deal with that again! No Macs as I know nothing about them. TIA, Trippsmom

http://www.ibuypower.com/AMD/amd-ph... "a soldier will fight long and hard for a bit of colored ribbon"

The Tech Report puts together some great system guides. Here's their April 2009 $500 "Econobox": http://techreport.com/articles.x/16... Excellent, excellent system for the price. It will easily handle the latest games, YouTube, movies, and of course, homework. :) Socket 939 Dual core Opteron 185 @ 3.2GHz on A8N32-SLI Deluxe 4GB of CL2 PC3200 2x 8800GTS in SLI Blu-Ray and HD-DVD X-Fi Titanium for PCI-E Vista x64. Samsung 24" LCD

Yes, I agree. If your son needs would be PC gaming, online gaming, Utube, email and WORD for homework, a desktop computer is more preferable. Besides, laptops are not intended for kids. If this is the case, I recommend that you find your best desktop items on this site - http://www.blazintech.net/. I bought most of my desktop parts from them and gladly, they truly provide the best items. Not to mention that they also give the most reasonable prices online. I hope this suggestions of mine would be of some help. ;)