That sounds like a decent enough machine to me.  The video card will help a lot, but I was saying in another posting, Wal-Mart just started carrying a GeForce FX5600 256 Mb card (I have one in lawaway. Oh, to dream...  If CompUSA had layaway... ) for about $250. I think the Athlon 2200 is somewhere equal to a 2.4 gig Pentium, but I never could figure out how to translate AMD's numbers.

I bought my PC at Wally world and did ok.  I got a 2.4 gig P4 with 512mb Ram and a 120 gig hd.  I added a stick of 512 mb ram to get 1024 total, and due to some problems with the purchase (see below) ended up with an extra 60 gig hd for a total of 180 gig hd.

One thing to be sure of...  buy a box that has been opened. I did and the box had been opened and someone had stolen the RAM and replaced the HD with a 60 gig.  They had upgraded their computer and returned this one.  I ended up dealing with Sony (It's a Vaio) and Wal-Mart on it and both were more than willing to help out.  They exchanged the tower and when I explained I already had installed some programs on the HD, they let me take that one too!

Wal-Mart is really getting some decent things computer wise.  I found one of those little USB keychain drives (128 mb) there for $40.00, and a DVD writer (next purchase) for around $250 also.

I used to work in the electronics dept at Wally (transfered to TLE now) and the E-Machines have seem to become a more dependable computer than when they first came out.  Didn't have too many problems with them other than the lower performance.  If I were you looking at a pre-fab machine, look in to HP's.  They cost a bit more, but you also get better performance.  Dollar to perfomance wise, they are both about the same.  I wouldn't go with the $500 machines though because they will be abit taxed uless you at the very least upgrade to an actual video card.  My Wally HP has been fine for over a year with a couple of upgrades.  I running 1.2 ghz celeron, 384 mb SDRAM (128 original), Ge-Force MX 440 SE PCI video card (intigrated originally), and 30 gig HD that is a bit over 50% full.  I get anywhere between 15 FPS at busy airports and well over 40 FPS (locked) in the air with medium detail settings.  If I max everything out, I usually don't see that much of a difference from my normal runs.  If you want to save money with the custom jobs, I'm not sure if you would save enough to warrant the effort on a smaller machine.  But if you are going for top dog, the customs are great.  A friend of mine priced all of the parts for a custom build of one of Alienwares top machine and could save about $1500, and still be the same spec. as the pre-fab version.