Agreed. I bought a $700 Pentium D early in 2006, and it still runs Crysis is pretty good with a 9800 gtx I got used for $130. DDR2 667 is still pretty fast too. Couldn't find a reason to upgrade to Core 2 Duo or Core i7.
The drafting department at Montachusett Regional Vocation Technical School in Massachusetts uses Novell, and everything seems to work great. Not sure what you are haunted about. The rest of the school runs off of an (Apple?) X-server (at least, it did when I graduated in 2005).