>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)

You don't understand then that the Celeron is a Slot1 or Socket370 processor; if you get a motherboard based on the 440BX or GX chipset, you can start with a Celeron and then switch to PIII or dual PIII systems, and there are some people who've hardware hacked the BX chipset to run dual Celerons. The same applies to Intel's 440GX, 810 and 820 chipsets.

Again, if you aren't playing with it as a hobby, it's a bad idea to try to stretch out the life of a system, given the rate that hardware prices and performance change. I think I have enough of a clue to handle my own hardware, and the same advice applies to my mother as to my clients; the availability of support is more important than proving how much testosterone you push through your hardware. I don't want to have the same machine 2 years from now, and I do work with hardware as a hobby. IOW, it's bad advice for the developer who doesn't want to deal with the headache of rolling his own and guessing wrong.

>
>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...)
>

I don't know where you buy, but I can pick up a 4x DVD at Staples for under $150, and better than that shopping on the net. It doesn't include a decoder card, but I'm recommending it as a CD-ROM on 'roids for software. Decoding may be adequate given the right video card; some ATI and Matrox cards have either significant hardware assist or full DVD decoder capabilities, and a 600MHz Celeron is going to be able to do soft decoding if that's all it's doing.