bought this computer 12 of august '03 at the apple store in the mall of america, no additional apple care (i'll buy that before the 1 year warranty expires) or products to go with it. i got a sweet deal on it with my higher education discount. the machine was easy to "assemble" right out of the box, and by default booted into OS X after user setup. noticing that the default 128mb of ram was insufficient to run many applications simultaneously, i took 2 256 ram modules from my other mac and installed those in the emac. this was an easy task that does require a philips screwdriver, but that by following the instructions provided in the user manual, even a novice user should be able to perform. a word of caution however, when purchasing ram, apple has somewhat strict standards, and it is best to purchase ram from a dealer that caters to apple hardware specifically, e.g. crucial.com et cetera. the addition of the new ram signifigantly increased the ability to run several apps simultaneously (and not bogging down the system) of the mac. a week later i purchased an airport extreme card to accomodate a new networking scheme in our house. the card was $100 dollars, and was easy to install, once again by following instructions provided by the user manual. i was disappointed to realize that airport extreme cards are only compatible with OS X, and so that any time i'm using OS 9, i am limited to either an ethernet connection (or modem), or using Classic mode under OS X. gaming performance is very satisfactory on this machine, but i'm sure i'm not getting mega-high framerates that 128mb video cards get, but unreal tournament 2003 is very playable at 800x600 and full details set. same with any game based on quake 3 engine. the speakers are *adequate*, but i choose to have my comptuters hooked up to my home stereo system for a higher fidelity sound. about the monitor...people who are sensitive to refresh rates but want a high resolution will be disappointed. in OS X, the best combination of resolution is 1280x960 at 72Hz. this is plenty fine for me, but i have known people who get eye strain at looking at anything slower than 80Hz. the refresh rate goes up to 89Hz at 1024x768, which seems fine to me in OS 9, but things look too silly and large in OS X. the new mouse and keyboard are nice. one more thing, in sleep mode, the white power indicating light next to the right speaker pulsates, and may be irritating to some people who are sleeping in the same room as there computer, as it does give off quite a bit of light when it pulses bright. i find the pulsating a lot less irritating than fan noise however.  
