Low end desktop for EE tasks?

Hello Folks,

Old iron horse here starts making creaking noises and it's tired. It only needs to do CAD, Gerber viewing, newsgroup, light SPICE sub-circuit sims (the kind that runs in a few seconds). IOW, I am replacing the grunt works PC.

Replacement should be <$500 sans monitor (won't give up my CRT, no way). And absolutely no Vista which excludes most lines. Anyone's got experiences with these lines?

Dell Vostro (desktop): Windows XP. 1GB RAM which is nice. No parallel port which ain't very nice, and the card from the old one won't fit I guess. Around $350.

HP Compaq DX2250: Windows XP. Has parallel port which is nice. 250MB RAM, well, that ain't cutting it. Price seems to pop right up if you deviate from pre-config. Otherwise around $350 as well.

--
Regards, Joerg

http://www.analogconsultants.com
.