Yes, you can get a PC without Vista -especially is you go with one of the real cheap boxes. If you want to go with Dell, or someone like that, keep an eye on www.bensbargains.net - there will often be great coupon deals for PCs from Dell. I usually buy from Dell, but I have also gotten very inexpensive PCs from pcconnection.com, buy.com and tigerdirect.com.

For antivirus, I am a huge fan of AVG by Grisoft - both Norton and Mcafee and total resource hogs and I find them very intrusive. AVG has a free personal version, and I now use the very inexpensive SOHO version to protect all of my PCs. I've never had a problem with it.

You'll probably get a nice long life out of your next PC if you go for something that can take 1 gig of RAM or more, and has a big hard drive. If you buy an inexpensive box with 512 meg RAM, see if you can get all that ram on one card in one slot, then use a site like 4allmemory.com or any of the other memory sites to get a compatible card for the other slot. It is often cheaper to buy the PC with less ram, and then buy more RAM from another site.

Good luck!