Reply #5: What details are you looking for?

[Maestro]

Here are some more detailed:

1) Case- Get a nice aluminum one. It disipates heat better. Lian-Li are personal favs.

2) CPU- AMD Athlon 64 class. If you are not a gamer or do any sort of computing that requires massive number crunching look into the Sempron line of AMD procs.

3) Motherboard- Wait another three weeks or so and grab a board from either Asus or Abit with the Nforce 4 chipset. These boards have never failed me and are very stable.

4) Memory - At least a gig of DDR 400 class memory so XP can function without bogging down. Corsair, Muskin, Kingston all make good sticks. Your memory needs to non-registered with low latency.

5) Video Card - Really depends on what you do. I would just stay away from any card with less than 64 meg of on-board memory. My personal choice is an Nvidia based vid card 6600 series and up, but I am a gamer and do some photo manipulation so I like the horsepower. ATI has good vid cards too. Check out the X800 XT line. Wow, very powerful.

6) Sound card - Really, on-board sound has become very good but if you want a sound card, SoundBlaster Audigy line is really the only choice. Great sound with low cpu useage makes this the only choice.

7) Monitor - LCD, just make sure it has a low response times, 16ms or below. For CRT's make sure the refresh is above 75hz for your preferred resolution. I have used both ViewSonic and NEC/Mitsubishi and have been pleased.

8) Make sure you use a good anti-virus program. I recommend the buy version of AVG, www.grisoft.com. Also, make sure to use a good spyware program. I personally use Adaware and Spybot 1.3 in conjunction and run them at least once a week. For my firewall I use Sygate Personal Firewall. www.sygate.com .

Hope this helps. Check www.pricewatch.com for the best prices. Furthermore, check out www.newegg.com or www.monarchcomputer.com for some good prices on systems and hardware. If you are gamer and want to get yourself a boutique type system here is a good manufacturer that is much less expensive than other boutique makers such as Falcon Northwest or Alienware, www.velocitymicro.com .

Dell make good computers. My only gripe with them is that their computers are very proprietary and make upgrading difficult.