In the 3 years I lived in the house, I received an AOL CD every week.

Wow. I've only ever received one of those things in my entire life! Hope I didn't jinx myself by saying that.

And speaking of store-built computers, why would anybody buy a Hewlett Packard?

Because they *do* actually make some good machines. I know that one of the owners of this studio in Toronto swears by them. Of course, those are the high end dual-proc machines tricked out for heavy FX and animation work. He swears that the HP graphics card and drivers are the ultimate in graphics performance (i.e. stability) for doing professional 3D graphics work on Linux systems.