I went to my friends house to deliver something the other day. I noticed a computer lying the corner looking a little worse for wear. He tried to upgraded the motherboard with with one that has an AGP slot so he could install a GFX card as the previous one only had onboard gfx. The upgrade did not work for some reason and the comp did not turned on. Anyways he got himself a laptop and just left it there for months waiting to be taken to the dump yard. I asked if I could have it and he said yes and that I was actually doing him a favour. When I got home I put back the old mother board and it booted fine . This is perfect for me as I was going to build a cheap comp to power the PJ I am building.The specs are:

intel celly at 1.8 ghz
60 HD
256 RAM

It's not super fast by any means but seems fast enough for dvd and divx and xvids. I take it hd vids will be out the question on a celly 1.8 ghz right?

My main concern however is the graphics. It's an emachines so it's cheap as chips graphics thats come with it, an on board Intel 82845G to be exact. Will this be good enough for dvds, divx, xvids etc? or should I get a lil upgrade such as an Radeon 9250 PCI 128MB or Geforce 4 MX PCI or even an old Geforce 2 mx? Anyone using onboard graphics with no problems?

If the onboard gfx supports 1280x1024, it will be able to display 720p. Hook up a monitor you know can display this resolution and see if the gfx will allow it. In any event you should be able to find a card to display 2048 x 1536 analog for under $40.

Intel built in vids have a reputation for being weak. It may also share memory with the main system memory which seems like it always leads to troubles. I would get an aftermarket card. You should also look up the model of the MB and find out if it can accept a higher processor. Celies are okay for desktop but they take big hits in video.

samuraijack makes some great points. one other thing is check if the MoBo can take a standard P4 (not 'celly') and if it accepts hyper threaded CPU's go for one. you'll notice a performance boost.

btw 256MB is kinda low if you run onboard graphics, try to upgrade that to 1gb or so.

Yeah, I think a ram upgrade is a must. Not sure about the cpu upgrade. Ive played divx full screen on an old celeron 600 laptop and it was fine, I am also on a tight budget I think I may even upgrade the gfx if can find something cheap. I will see if I can find a cheap radeon 9200 pci or something. I hear ATIs are better at colour and have some good video features.

My computer is 1.6 GHz and it runs divx, dvds and xvid fine so you shouldn't have any trouble. Maybe some more ram and a graphics card if you want.

From the sound of it, it should be a socket 478 so you should be able to get a Pentium 4; however, with that emachine motherboard, overclocking is out of the question IMO. Get like a x800 for like $85 on Newegg and you should be able to game on Half Life 2 . Its the cheapest 256 bit GPU I could find.

X800 would be nice a bit out of my price league though and I would need to upgrade the mobo to one with an AGP. I think I will get an radion 9200 pci which should be good enough for what I am using.