The $99 Desktop

I've been looking at wholesale companies who sport ridiculous deals. I found one a few days ago. True Data Products refurbishes and sells computers (mostly notebooks) for good prices. These kind of people are part of the reason I have four notebooks (I have a Winbook, too). I was scrolling through their list Tuesday on my Gateway Solo 5300 ($469 from a local wholesaler) and I found an outrageous deal. They were offering a Compaq Mini-Tower for 99 bucks. You read that correctly. A quick check of the checking account showed that it was buyable. I called them up, told em I wanted the desktop and it was done. I waited. A week later, a FedEx dude rapped at my door with the PC. I unboxed it to find a disappointment. My 99 bucks got me a PC with an Intel Pentium II processor (500 MHz), a 6 GB hard drive, 128 MB of SDRAM, and no montor, an out-of-place white mouse, and a plain CD-ROM drive and floppy. What the heck?! I decided to test it out. Once I hooked it to the proper monitor, I was met with a slow PC. It had no productivity apps, no graphics card, and not much anything else. The only real app it had was Microsoft Word. Perhaps it was targeted at PC builders who take every component out of a computer and put entirely new stuff in (that's me). Who knows? All I know is that I can just get another grand and do the same thing I did to my Gateway.