My main PC (1998 vintage) is not well and I need to consider some new hardware. As much as I would like to go 100% linux my daughter relies on the other OS. So, what do I buy? I need something pretty quickly, which means I will not be building it myself. I have no experience with dual booting XP or repartitioning such drives (done it with win95 and win98 and FAT32). That brings me to HDDs. All decently spec'ed boxes now come with SATA drives. Does tha mean my old drives will not be able to live in the same box?

My needs are modest and to be frank, any new box will be quick compared with my PII 333!

This is what I would like:

I Gig of ram
A reasonable graphics card - I don't play games
A sound card that will give me some scope for MIDI
DVD writer
Wireless mouse and keyboard
Scope for wireless networking in the future

Should I be concerned whether Intel or AMD?
Should I go SATA or is it unnecessary?
Are there any specific UK suppliers that anyone can recommend (know a bit about linux hardware compatibility)?

Any thoughts appreciated,

Thanks.

The filesystem you use for windows shouldn't matter (xp can use ntfs or fat32) but you will only be able to write to fat32 in linux so if you set up xp on ntfs you may wish to have an extra fat32 partition for file storage.

As for intel/amd I'm not tied to either but take a look at:
http://hardware.slashdot.org/article...id=155&tid=137

Sata will give you some performance gains over ide but for most applications you probably won't notice a difference. If you are intending to create and edit videos with your dvd writer than sata may help a little bit. With most systems you can continue to use ide as well as sata but it will depend on the motherboard (most systems are ide and sata now)

In terms of suppliers you really can't go too far wrong with Dell:
http://www.dell.co.uk

One thing to watch out for is the graphics adapter and get an nvidia model rather than ati. This is another good reason for going with dell, there aren't many companies that give you such easy customisation.

Thanks David.

Interesting what you say about the filesystem. One of my concerns is that these boxes come preinstalled with XP on one massive partition. Will I have a choice? Ideally it would be good to spec the box to have an NTFS system partition and the balance of the drive left for me to prep eg. a 200Gig drive with say 20Gig to NTFS and 30Gig FAT32. Think of all those linux distros I could cram in the the 150Gig

It probably will come preinstalled and without the option to change the partition layout. You could use parted to resize the partitions but to be honest I'd probably start from scratch anyway and get rid of any annoying little programs that the manufacturers install for you.