Good Deal... Happened to be at the right place at the right time, and you looked it up first to make sure you werent buying a lemon.
I made the mistake buying an open box computer from staples at 27% discount on a $999 computer and I was told if I had any problems with it that its as-is and Id be dealing with HP for warranty. I requested that we boot it up right there and they did. It ran fine although had the original owners name at auto logon of XP. I grabbed it up because the Pentium 4 systems at the time were costly and I thought I was getting a great deal. Got it home and went to add my video card to it and .... NO AGP SLOT .... NOOOOooooooooooooooo!
I needed it for gaming and a PCI video card wasnt going to cut it. The motherboard even had a place for an AGP Slot to be on the board but they skimped on the cost of the motherboard and must have ordered the motherboards to not come with AGP slots as a way to squeeze out a few dollars more profit out of each sale.
This wasnt exactly an issue that HP Warranty would cover, and so I ended up finding a person at my work that was willing to give me $400 for it that wasnt a gamer and they were happy to save $600 on the cost of a new computer, took that $400 and went to Radio Shack and got a AMD Athlon XP 2800+ Compaq Presario S6030NX tower without display for $549. At Radio Shack I requested to take side panel off the demo unit before purchase to make sure it had an AGP Slot and it did. So I ended up paying in the end about $1040 for a gaming system and not getting the Pentium 4 but Athlon XP instead because of my failure to verify features before making my purchase. Looking back, I probably should have done a motherboard swap to a motherboard that had a AGP Slot, but then I would have ran into issues with the System Recovery Discs not working for the build because of a different motherboard. I would have needed someones copy of XP to install from and then use my XP Home key to activate. I might have saved myself money this way and had a Pentium 4 vs Athlon XP. But the Athlon XP 2800+ 2.08Ghz played games fine even though just a single core back in 2004.
The original owner probably returned it to get a system that had a AGP slot for gaming is my guess as for it was otherwise a good computer, and they had a game installed to it before I did factory system recovery clean install that wouldnt run on the integrated Intel 845 GL GPU compaining that it wanted a GeForce 2 or better with 64MB Video RAM. They probably fell victim to the same failure to check for AGP slot first and get rid of it before they were stuck with it. Then I came along and got stuck with it making the same mistake. Staples probably knew it didnt have this AGP slot too in the original owners complaint on return. So they wanted to move it fast before they take a serious loss.
