I plan on buying a new hard drive and a new video card to upgrade the originals in my compaq 4880. I want a 20gb hd and a video card with at least 64 mb of video ram. Any one have any suggestions on which ones will give the best performance with the least hassle setting them up on linux?

As for video card if you can spare $160 at least go with GeForce4 Ti4200 64 Mb video card (just don't go crazy to get 128Mb it is not worht it) - it is a good performance card for less than 200 bucks, the NVIDIA drivers are easy to install if you follow the instaructions http://nvidia.com/view.asp?PAGE=linux , as for a HD I personaly prefer Maxtors - I have 2 of them with 2 years difference in age - no problems so far. Of course if you can afford SCSI drive it is much faster - I recommend Seagate Cheetah SCSI drive - it is a little pricey though check out http://www.procewatch.com for the latest prices snapshots.