Hi Gilly,

One point overlooked in all the above (don't mean to obfuscate your situation) ...

First I agree with PF about the AMD Athlon. Best price performance ratio going. And your not paying for the Intel name (over-rated) and getting equivalent or better performance. Yes, the 2.5 gig is a great buy.

And it's not really difficult to build your own system. When you buy one from any of the commercial vendors, it sort of equates to the NASA mission: you're getting 10,000 parts, all from the lowest bidder.

Building your own allows you to pick and choose which hard drive, which burner, which motherboard, etc. Putting them all together requires only that you take your time, watch out for static, and voila!!!

As I began saying, buying a commercial machine guarantees you are getting the "minimum daily requirement" as far as component reliability is concerned. Everything in there is running at the max design allowance simply because adding components that have, for instance, a 20% tolerance in their design factor means adding a couple of bucks to each unit ... Compaq, Dell, Gateway, HP, EMachines ... doesn't matter. When it comes to churning out 10,000 units a month, that couple of bucks per machine adds up, so they just don't do it. It's a matter of competition and price cutting.

One of the areas that are perpetually overlooked for the task at hand is the power supply. All the commercial vendors put in an under-nourished power supply, designed only for the components that are included at the point of manufacture.

When you begin adding more "stuff" (extra CD, a DVD, a high performance video card, etc) that require extra power, that whimpy power supply that was great on the vanilla machine can no longer provide the needed watts. The result is unexplained system hangs, blue screens of death, and various other anomolies due to fluctuating system voltages.

For example, most processors run at 3.0 volts. EXACTLY. When it's processing instructions at the rate of 2,500,000,000 per second, even a minor power fluctuation (1/100th of a volt) of say 1/30 th of a second means that the processor has just hiccupped on millions of instructions!!! BLUE SCREEN OF DEATH.

No matter what you buy, check with the vendor to make sure you are getting at least a 400 watt (more is better) power supply. A good beefy power supply will run cooler, and will not be forced to run at it's maximum. And because everything else in there depends on its stable operation, you will most likely have fewer problems with your other components as well, since devices that are able to run at their specified power ratings run cooler, last longer.

A good example of that is a CD burner. If the power fluctuates while you're burning a CD (the burning process requires more power), you can either throw the CD away or use it as a nice coaster.

If you choose to build your own, a good mid-tower case will have ample room for adding extra stuff in the future (more bays, more space for hard drives, etc) and most cases already come with a very good power supply as part of the package.

Good luck ...

The Dog