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Poll experienced computer users about sub-$1000 PCs, and you'll hear words like slow, compromised, limited, and obsolete used to describe them. Not long ago, those terms would have been accurate. PCs in this class typically offered the slowest processors, the smallest hard drives, aging graphics subsystems, and terrible sound. They were often small, difficult-to-upgrade boxes with cheap keyboards and tiny monitors--attractive only to unlucky first-time buyers who didn't know any better.

Nonetheless, even experienced users considered sub-$1000 systems, for one reason: They were incredibly cheap. If a $999 PC became obsolete in a year or two, so what? For that price, you might not feel cheated if you had to buy a whole new system a year later.

Landfill No Longer

Has the sub-$1000 PC finally come of age, or is it still just a way for vendors to part fools from their money? To find out, we ordered 21 of the most recent offerings. From our past experiences with low-cost machines, we had low expectations. After all, given that the average computer on our Top 20 charts costs between $1500 and $2000 these days, how much can you expect for $999?

It turns out that you can expect quite a lot. The systems we looked at offer surprisingly peppy performance, reasonably strong feature sets, and thoughtful design. They lack some of the advantages of their higher-priced counterparts (see "For a Few Dollars More") and require you to watch out for inferior components (see "Cheap PC Pitfalls"), but for general business computing and Internet browsing, these machines will suit most people's needs.

$999 Gets You the Whole Enchilada

If one of those big, bright $999 price tags catches your eye, read the fine print before you take the bait. PC vendors, in their zeal to advertise something for under a grand, have been known to omit certain niceties--like a monitor--from the price. When we ordered systems for this review, we asked vendors to send us a complete system priced below $1000 (excluding rebates and special offers). To ensure that these PCs were truly usable, we set minimum requirements: a 4GB hard drive, a 12X­24X CD-ROM drive, 32MB of system memory, speakers, either a modem or a network card, and a 15-inch monitor.

Most of the systems we received exceeded our minimum requirements. They offered an average hard drive capacity of 6GB, and 16 came with 64MB of RAM--twice our baseline amount. Six systems (including five in the Top 10) shipped 17-inch monitors, and three bundled DVD-ROM drives--an elegant touch unheard of at this price a few months ago. A few systems held above-average sound cards and speedy 3D graphics boards, too.

Historically, vendors have crammed their cheapest PCs into small cases and built them around bargain motherboards, sacrificing upgradability in the process. But most of the sub-$1000 systems we reviewed are as expandable as PCs that cost two to three times as much. The midsize tower and minitower cases typical of this class offer users a generous number of open drive bays, memory sockets, and expansion card slots.

Celeron Bounces Back

Not surprisingly, low-cost processors--such as Intel's Celeron and AMD's K6-2 and K6-III--lie at the core of this new generation of PCs. But something has changed since the unveiling of last year's $999 PCs: The budget processors in today's sub-$1000 PCs are among the newest on the market. Most systems in this roundup use 366-MHz or faster versions of Intel's Celeron--a once-maligned class of CPU that has made remarkable performance strides. In fact, 11 of the PCs in our Top 20 Budget Desktops list this month use Celerons.

Intel is churning out new Celeron processors so fast that some vendors will no longer offer the Celeron-366 by the time you read this. But take heart: The vendors tell us you should be able to buy a Celeron-400­based system with the same configuration, for under a grand.

Overall, these cheap PCs perform surprisingly well. Even the slowest of the systems managed a PC WorldBench 98 score of 153--close to the average for all Pentium II-333 systems, and more than adequate for typical business applications. Our two Best Buys earned a PC WorldBench score of 192, which makes them front-runners among PCs with the same CPU and amount of memory.

Lower Cost, Fewer Choices

On a machine tagged in the low three figures, expect fewer options. In fact, the further a PC's price sinks beneath the magic $999 mark, the less flexibility you get. Emachines' Etower 366i, for example, is a take-it-or-leave-it proposition. At $738, it's the least-expensive system in this roundup. But like all Emachines PCs, it ships in a fixed configuration. Similarly, PC maker Microworkz can sell its ultracheap Webzter Jr. for just $300 because the company doesn't use state-of-the-art components or customize its PCs. Microworkz couldn't send us a system in time for inclusion in this review, but we tested a pair of the vendor's PCs for this month's Top 10 Home PCs. Neither system made the Top 10 chart. We also cover Microworkz in this month's On Your Side, in which we detail some readers' complaints that Microworkz failed to ship systems within the promised three- to four-week time frame.

Jon L. Jacobi and Joel Strauch are freelance writers based in the San Francisco Bay area. Andrew Brandt is an associate editor for PC World, and Tom Spring is a reporter/editor for PC World Online. Ulrike Diehlmann, Robert James, Elliott Kirschling, Jeffrey Kuta, and Mike Salayko of the PC World Test Center designed and administered the performance, graphics, and monitor tests for the systems in this roundup.