re: IRS computers crashed 10 days after House committee sent letter asking...

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You are buying off a government contract and as usual you can buy a computer on open market cheaper. SO the $2000 may be low. I had that conversation many times when I was a Fed. I could walk into Best Buy and purchase a more powerful machine for half the cost. Also, budgets don't allow for new machines to be purchased for everyone every year or even very 3 years.

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I work on the State level, we spent 2012-2013 upgrading 95% of our users to Windows 7 either with new computers or adding RAM to current computers that had qualifying processors. Among our 600-700 users we have only 4 whose new machines might be in the $2k range, and those 4 do work with multiple TIFF files at a time (really, really big pics, for the non-IT crowd). The rest of the desktops were under $1k with the few laptops we purchased being about $1,200. No idea what they are using at the IRS, but we use Dells here and get a decent discount because we do so much business with them. An agency as large as the IRS should be getting a much better deal (but then again the federal government has never been known as "thrifty").