[thelist] Hardware Purchase Advice

[the head lemur]

Case:
Power supply 400+watts
if you are crazy like me use hot swaps
or have two
Server case. 6 +Bays
trust me only gamers look at the box...
1 for CD-DVD-RW
4 for Removable Drive bays
4 removable drive cases

Mother board with raid

Gigabyte or MSI
I use AMD exclusively(YMMV)

4 matching harddrives
c drive OS only
d drive data
e drive mirror of c
f drive mirror of d

I do not use maxtors under any circumstances
WD or Hitachi-IBM
IDE 100 is good enough for storage

2 floppy bays
1 for floppy
1 for media reader(6 or 8 way)ya can read just about anything made.

As much ram as your OS will support
Get 512 sticks as 1 gb sticks are expensive and hard to get

Video
photo work
128+MB dual head
I use Nvidia as ATI loads tons of crap till you get to the driver

Monitors
1-17-19'' as 95 % of the time you will never display on any other size
1 Flat LCD not for color but for data

Audio if you need beyond on board
get 5'1 speakers
great for watching dvd's while you are thinking

NIC Cards buy the cheap ones and have two. Do not use the on board nic.
USB get a separate 5 port card 1 internal 4 external.
most motherboards come with four, but you will be suprised how fast they
fill up...laser,color printer,scanner,external cords for cameras, external
harddrive cases, zip drives ect.

64 bit is moving into the SATA/PCI Express/ect. which needs about a year to
mature.

the stuff above will get you thorugh the next three years.


Get a track ball!
You can get keyboards with integrated trackboards but are milspec and real
spendy..(but hey ya never know when you need to go from the jungle to the
artic circle....

happy computing!

the head lemur
blog: http://theheadlemur.typepad.com/
Community: http://www.evolt.org