I previously had my home network storage and network-wide ad-blocker (Pi-Hole) running on a very old Pentium laptop and it was slow and on its last legs. I bought this HP Compaq desktop system to upgrade all that. I am so happy that I did! It is an excellent value for the money. Below is a summary of how you can use this machine for your home network rather than for normal use, just in case anyone is shopping for that purpose.First:The sellers did an excellent job on the refurb. Everything arrived as promised and in great shape. I didn't need the mouse/keyboard, but they were in the box. Now I have spares.All peripherals that I plugged in worked without issue: monitor, ethernet, USB mouse/keyboard, etc. The sellers also included a USB HDMI adapter which was a really nice touch! It worked great.Next:This is a small tower PC so there are not really spare bays available when you open it up to mess with hardware. My workaround to put in a 2nd hard drive was to remove the optical drive and replace it with an optical drive caddy for hard drives (you can easily find them on Amazon by searching). No one uses CD/DVD RW's anymore so that was an easy decision to replace it with an additional hard drive! For the second drive, I installed a 240 GB SSD. The computer shipped with a 500 GB HDD (not solid-state) and I left that in place in the main bay. The tower is very easy to open up with all hardware very easily accessible inside if you want to swap out components.From there, I prob deviate from what most people use this for, like I said above with home networking! I did boot it with Windows once just to make sure it turned on and recognized all hardware and etc. Then I created an Ubuntu 20.04 boot drive, restarted, and wiped Windows from the system entirely. I installed Ubuntu to the 240 GB SSD and designated the 500 GB HDD as additional storage. I also installed Pi-Hole on the machine as a network-wide ad-blocker. I then shared the 500 GB HDD and an external 4 TB HDD that I plugged into one of the many USB ports across my home network with read/write access so that I can access any files I want from any device. My other devices connected without issue to the server (multiple laptops and a network printer/scanner) and accessing my files is BLAZING FAST now thanks to the quad-core processor, 8 GB RAM and running the system from an SSD.I guess it is also important to note that once I got all this up and running, I don't have a monitor, mouse, or keyboard plugged into it anymore. It's simply not necessary because it will stay turned on at all times to host files and Pi-Hole, and from this point forward I should rarely need to tweak any software or OS settings on it.In summary:-This is a great computer for use as a file server or general office work. For either, it's a good idea to put in an SSD as the boot drive for a bit of extra speed - especially if you will be using only Windows-This would NOT be great for heavy gaming or multi-media editing. Not enough power. You can definitely add in more RAM but dedicated graphics won't be a thing here.-It plays friendly with Linux distros given that Ubuntu is running like a dream on it.-If wireless is important to you, this doesn't ship with wireless in it, but there are very cheap USB wireless adapters available. I installed one of those in addition to ethernet. No issues!Hope this helps someone out who is looking for a great home network machine. Highly recommend this one for that purpose!