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Another thing to keep in mind, brands like Compaq, Hewlett Packard and Dell are proprietary. That means if you need parts later, or want to upgrade, you HAVE to buy your stuff from that company. I tend to steer away from proprietary manufacturers. Stay with something generic. I personally prefer Gateway. You can get them at retail stores and you can put anything in them from any computer store. I have three of them and would buy another in a heartbeat! There are others or you can build your own.
Whatever you get I would opt for the DDR2 ram. I've heard nothing but good reviews on Toshiba laptops, although they are a bit more costly. If your like me you probably want a warranty since I have constantly spilled drinks around my computer. I won't get into who is better out of AMD processors or Intel since one surpasses the other every year (like leap frog) but you probably want a good 1.8ghz processor or higher. Try and stay away from the bcm43xx chipset... that is a Broadcom wireless card and they are dookie. I got my setup at Fry's but alot of people like tigerdirect or newegg, they have some pretty good deals. Ah, and I agree with Snowbunny and Arctic about staying away from Vista... just my preference. I run Vista and XP Pro off the same harddrive and I find that I never even boot up Vista anymore.
I replaced my aged and dying PC (had it built as a remote for a 21 unit generator farm I was running) for a new Gateway in January and it had Vista as a core load. Only problem I've had was with my Wireless Router took a dump after a week. It's got a lot of extra stuff/crap I don't need but it works fine.
Now because of conflicts with software for work they got XP on my work lap top from the office. We still use some old software that really needs updating and it's incompatable with Vista.
I still have XP on the wife's lap top and don't plan on changing it.
I have XP Pro at home and Media Center on my laptop. Both work just fine, so I also have no intention of changing. I too have Gateways and when I buy another system for my daughter's graduation, it'll be a Gateway as well.
Thanks my friends.......I will go shopping this weekend armed with the info you have given me!!!!....I would have been that sucker that they sold the crap to!!!....But now you have all given me some ammunition to take with me!.....Cant thank every enough!!!!
Wheres oneminizut. I can't get ubuntu to load passed the laguage screen
Ok, did I send you the 64bit cpu/alu architecture or the x86. Also I would like a LONG list of what hardware you are working with. I know you built it yourself so it may be 32 bit. I need partition sizes, what you did, how you got there. Did you follow the partition sizes for root, swap, and maybe /usr/local? I need to really IM you to walk you through it. do you have my phone number? (253)330-4839. And my email is oneminizut@gmail.com if you forgot. I'd like to help you but I need an instant notification for every step in the process. Take care George. We'll talk soon.
George is one of the names I saw on your email. Sorry... I scan through things so fast and I always think of people by their screen names like Arctic, Snowbunny, Rex, Marty... etc.