Sadly, it looks like I'm falling short of my $500 price point goal... screwed up mainly by the cost of monitor and a copy of Windows 7... which cost over $200 all by themselves. But even if we exclude those costs... which isn't really fair to be honest... it would still cost probably $600-700 to construct a desktop that would exceed a $2000 MacBook Pro from my quick lunchtime perusal of Newegg. Sow while I could construct a pretty decent computer for $500, it would be more like a grand to reach expensive Apple laptop standards when you factor in all costs. So off by a factor of two in my guesstimate, but in my defense when I upgrade my own computer I don't need to buy things like a monitor, keyboard, mouse, or copy of Windows. Here's a parts list (that doesn't include those things) that I put together quickly:
Shuttle Barebone System
i5 2.8 GHz quad core
4 GBs of memoryShuttle Barebone System
i5 2.8 GHz quad core
GeForce GT 240 512MB
Western Digital 500GB 7200 RPM HDD
24x DVD Burner
Which clocks in at $670.74. Not too shabby. The video card is fairly pedestrian and budget oriented, but from benchmarks I could find at a glance, it looks like it would blow the doors off the GT 330M in the MacBook. If Anna wants to do this for real I'd probably stay away from the "barebones" system and look for some combo deals to get a case, power supply, and motherboard... save some money and get better quality parts... but the small form factor is nice.
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