Russell,
That's good info for me, I'm wanting to upgrade from my '486', don't laugh !
So do you recommend staying with the Pentium? - some are recommending Athlon!
I don't know enough about them !!
512MB memory -do you recommend SDRor DDR RAM.
I'm watching the prices, recently the RAM went way down and is now up
again -is the no-name brands anygood ?

George,
I still have a 486DX2/66 with 32MB running Linux at home.  It's my firewall
machine (it has 2 Ethernet cards: one to the DSL modem, the other to my hub).  My
biggest problem is the buffoons at my ISP are unable to understand me since I'm
*so* far away from their run-of-the-mill customer.  I regularly get sent to
LinkSys (a router/hub manufacturor) when I tell them my machine is running Linux
(say them out loud).

Athlon is a fine chip.  Unless you've got some heavy math (Are you running
Mathematica? Doing computational fluid dynamics?), the Athlon will be
indistinguishable from the same clock speed Pentium.  The biggest problem is the
big vendors (HP, Compaq, Dell) don't sell it; they sell Celeron instead.  Celeron
is a mostly a Pentium with the L1 cache deleted.  They're real dogs compared to
Pentiums or Athlons of the same clock speed.

DDR and SDR memory are both new, bleeding edge technologies (in the PC market; SDR
has been around for a while in the workstation market).  Expect unstable prices
for a while to come.  As for quality: heck if I know.  If you are willing to risk
the hassle of having your machine unstable/unavailable, get the cheap stuff and a
good warranty.  If not, get the name brand stuff and a good warranty.  Odds are,
both chips came from the same fab in Idaho (Micron Technologies) and were packaged
in the same assembly site in Singapore or Malaysia.  Sometimes the the only
difference is the warranty (and thus the price).

Russell Kent

 
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