Building a new PC

I'm doing that just now. Made things a bit dificult for myself by making it dual boot, XP and Vista. Then decided to add Linux, as there are a lot of guys at works who advocate Linux. Having trouble with the Boot Manager (GRUB) just at the moment, but with a bit of help, should be able to sort that.

I went for an Intel E6600, then reading various web reviews, found that it can be overclocked from 2.4GHz to 4GHz and still stable. Don't think I'll go that far, but it is by far the most clockable of the Core Duos, and if you go to http://www.tomshardware.co.uk/cpu/charts.html?modelx=33&model1=432&model2=433&chart=186 site, it turns in a pretty good performance without overclocking. the E6400 is no slouch, and quite a bit cheaper. If you really want to pare costs, then the Intel D915 or D925 would be a good bet. I always used to use AMD, but they can't touch Intel at the moment.

I decided that 2GBytes memory should be sufficient, but there is room on the MB for another couple of slots.

For disks, I decided on 3 x 320GB, so I could raid a striped pair. This effectively doubles the disk read/write speeds, but does have the disadvantage that a single disk failure can trash the contents of both disks. As Mongoose says, mirror raid only protects against a disk failure, but a lot of corruptions are replicated faithfully onto the mirror. Just make sure that you always have a CD/DVD backup. The third disk is used to take snapshot backups of the Operating Systems and other important data, so I can restore any corrupted part easily. As its the identical to the other 2 disks, it can also be used as a spare if one of them should fail.

As for Vista, I decided on the 64bit version, and most of the drivers for the hardware are not on the support disks and have to be downloaded from the manufacturer's website (this is the same for the 32 bit version). I'm sure that there are some flaky drivers in there somwhere, it's not as stable as XP, and forces more validations than XP.

Cheers

Malcolm

PS, let us know what you decide, and how you get on.

Brian,

Not sure whether it would interest you, but I've got a couple of external HDD's to which I backup. Don't know how the Windows utility does it, but I use 'Casper', which clones the drive you're backing up. So backed up files are readily accessible (I could just take the disk with me if I wanted to use the images off-site), and Casper's 'Smart-Clone' means that once a disk is copied, the next cloning just does the bits that have changed.

Quite useful when I've got nearly 100Gb of images. Means that a backup takes, usually, less than a minute. I backup everyday to one of the disks, and fortnightly to the other, which I figure gives me a chance to recover corrupted files, even if they've been copied to the first backup disk. Certainly not foolproof, but better than not backingup at all...

Dan