>>>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:-)).
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>>You started on big iron - my first work was on a PDP 8i with 4K of 12 bit core...
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>LoL:-)
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>>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
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>>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!
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>>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.
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>And I thought I had a nice system here at the office.:-) My home system is a 200 w/MMX, 48 Mb, and a 2 Gb drive. I'm going to try to make it last at least one more year. Can't afford to have to upgrade the machine every year.

I need several machines at home, at least one that can handle IIS4, since I'm doing a lot of ASP development right now, so an NT Server is pretty well mandated. I watch some of the discounters pretty closely for price deals - as an example, I picked up the XP39100Ws (9.1GB UW SCSI drives) for under $400 each, including shipping; the CP2107s were a steal at $130/each (they were SCA mount drives, so I had to buy adapters, but again, I got UW SCSI drives cheap.)

AFAIC, SCSI is pretty much mandatory if you're working the hardware very hard; buying a motherboard that I like with the Adaptec Chipset on the board saves me a slot (or two), and usually 4$40-60 on the cost of an equivalent board without the on-board SCSI Chipset and a decent quality HA. Using all Adaptec makes moving stuff between systems easy - if you switch vendors, they may take different approaches to how to reference a drive >1GB, so you end up having to reformat once in a while.

I've found a great vendor for SuperMicro stuff out on the web - PC Nut Computers; I met the owner, Humphrey Chen, while doing work for PC World OnLine. His prices are great, he knows what he's doing, and he doesn't cut corners buying crappy components. If you deal with clients who need small enterprise servers, he's got the equipment and knowledge to put together solid, fault tolerant systems at a fraction of the cost of an HP, Compaq or IBM server box using either SuperMicro or ASUS motherboards using multiple PII or Xeon processors and the SuperMicro or PC Power & Cooling cases.

Not being married helps, too.