>>>Many thanks for the URL, I'll be sure to check it out. I did take the diagnostics out of the system tray. Bad idea?
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>>Not at all - you can access all the configuration options from the Control Panel applet in any case. if you're like me, I have far too many things in the tray already - scheduler, 3com, a couple of display thingies, volume, Quicktray, GetRight, NewsAlert, the keyboard enhancer for the Logitech keyboard, WaveTop, WebTV and Dilbert Desktop Games are a permanent fixture, with Outlook and MS Money leaving things there when they need attention, too. Thank god for small icons and large monitors!
>
>I must confess a weakness for rather Spartan system configurations. Only the volume control and the date/time. No wallpaper, a simple screen saver. Gotta conserve those resources.:-) Yeah right. A PII 350 with 128Mb and a 13 Gb hard drive, and I'm conserving resources. I attribute it to starting my computing experience on a 16K Atari 400 (you had to hunch over to program:-)).

You started on big iron - my first work was on a PDP 8i with 4K of 12 bit core...

I'm a bit spoiled at home. I like SuperMicro's motherboards, especially the ones with the Adaptec SCSI chip on-board. The Win98 box is just a PII/333, but 256MB, and 'only' 8GB of disk space, but it's a pair of Quantum Atlas XP34450Ws on an AIC 7880 chip on the motherboard (the same as an Adaptec 2940UW HA) and a Jaz drive. This is the older P6DLS, which is an LX chipset and won't take the faster PII processors

The NT boxes are bigger, and based on the more recent P6DGS and P6DGU; the one running NT Workstation is the DGU with dual PII/350s, 256MB and an old XP32150W and an XP39100W; the server is bigger, with dual PII/400s, 2 XP39100Ws and an array of 5 CP2107s (the motherboard is SuperMicro's P6DGS, dual processor, dual channel UW SCSI) and the ARO1130SA RAIDPort. Everything has a 3C905B in it, and I switched to a 100Mbit hub a few weeks ago, so everything is nice and quick!

I've been impressed with the SuperMicro boards; they're fast, and have not given me any compatibility problems except with a Diamond Viper V550 AGP card. All three will support ECC SDRAM, and the DGU and DGS in particular make nice, solid workgroup or small enterprise servers; both have hardware RAID options, and will take up to 2GB and two processors.