> 1- Quiet case with at least one forward usb port A good case is a good investment, as I found out not a while ago. I replaced my case since the old one was impossible to cool down properly, and the new one I got has proven me that in this field (as in many others), you get what you pay for. Make sure that the case uses 12cm fans and not smaller, if you ever want it to be quiet.
> 4- 500 Mb RAM. Prefer DDRam over SDRam ? There's only DDR these days. And I'd join the recommendation of 1 GB. > 5- I would prefer a motherboard with 2-3 expansion > slots. The motherboard is the most important part, and a bad board will contribute directly to a system being unstable. I buy only ASUS since I've had the best experience with them. If you're going for AMD, take one with the nForce chipset, since they support PCIe and are generally more novel than their VIA counterpart. If you're going for an Intel, buy one with Intel's own chipset and not SIS. > A sore point about the motherboard is the built in > graphic card. > Configuring X with the Sis adaptor and my MAG 786PFs > monitor is, > in my experience non-trivial. And these seem to be > quite popular. > Has anyone had adifferent experiance, or I should > avoid such > motherboards at all costs ? There are boards with nForce chipsets that have a built-in GeForce VGA chip. If you don't mind working with the nVidia driver, I think it's a very good deal. The rest of the built-in adaptors suck and you'll be much better off with a separate card. I'm saying this assuming that the computer will not be used for heavy gaming, in which case you should definitely get a separate adaptor. Beware that cheap adaptors sometimes give you worse quality on the analog VGA connection -- it's hard to see without a side-by-side comparison, but I had at home two GeForce boards, one from ASUS and one no-name, and the latter had quite obviously more blurry output with the same monitor. --Alex __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Tired of spam? Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around http://mail.yahoo.com ================================================================= To unsubscribe, send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the word "unsubscribe" in the message body, e.g., run the command echo unsubscribe | mail [EMAIL PROTECTED]
