I wanted a small footprint PC that would accept PCI-E expansion cards to run PFSense firewall software and this PC fit the bill perfectly. With a gigabit Intel 2 port server NIC, this machine makes a great firewall. I expect that it would run Windows 7 pretty well (Core i5 and 8GB RAM) if I needed it for that, but I would have first swapped out the HDD for an SSD. I'll take a 5 year old i5 processor machine with an SSD over a brand new top end i7 powered machine with a conventional HDD any day.