Hi Ed,

Sorry, no disagreements on either of your points!

The point I was making (albeit possibly poorly) was spend more on the infastructure (ie SCSI and Pentium II or III). It's easy (and relatively inexpensive) to add memory and a second processor later vs. a new motherboard/CPU which may also necessitate buying other boards (because of incompatibilities). When I bought my 450 MHZ processor it cost almost $500 now under $200 (made in same facility). RAM is even cheaper although I've been looking for better pricing on 256 MB 6ms which hasn't dropped as fast as 128 MB RAM. Even that being the case, for well under $500, I can easily expand my system (w/o compatibility issues) to a screaming dual processor w/384MB RAM; Lets see someone do that when they 'outgrow' a Celeron! Of course, for more money I have many options on the CPUs which I can upgrade to (my board can handle dual 650MHZ pentium IIIs)

I also agree with the DVD drive, Peter made it sound like his budget limited him to either CD-RW, or CD-ROM and CD-RW, with that type of constraint I would recommend adding the CD-ROM for the difference in price... Depending on budget, I might still suggest the CD-ROM and wait for DVDs to drop a bit more in price (I did just buy one at $119 for the family computer...)

Something I didn't see discussed, I paid a premium for my computer case so that it could handle four 5 1/4 half height devices, lots of (internal) HDs (with removeable mounts) extra fans and a power supply that can handle future demands! Not to mention since it has easily removable panels and the drive cages, it's an absolute pleasure to work on < s >, I'll never buy a 'mini' tower again!

I've learned from my past mistakes, such as going local-bus 1 month before PCI came out (dohhh), on building an flexible and expandable system!

regards

-michael

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>Faster at what? Mainly loading and switching between multiple applications, I find I don't regularly run very intensive CPU type apps (I'd expect Excel would be much faster on the PIII box after it's been loaded). If you're like me and constantly switch between IE, VFP, InterDev, Word, and Outlook and sometimes VB < sigh >, you may want to put more emphisis in the drive subsystem...

Three little words: buy more RAM

>My mother board can accept a second processor but quite honestly I haven't felt the need to add it, but the Web server I'm adding may change that!

Depending on what you do, a 2nd processor can make a big difference; my server does a lot of stuff - IIS, AD Master, Proxy, SMTP/POP3, router I noticed about 1.5x the performance of a single processor once I got enough RAM installed (I ended up with 320MB and dual 400MHz P-IIs; I picked up a RAIDPort II kit cheap so the RAID doesn't add to the congestion.) If you're hitting the swap file a lot, more RAM maxing at 512MB is usable for Slot1 processors.