Hardware recommendations, please

[Chris F.A. Johnson]

   I am in the market for a new desktop system, but my knowledge of PC
   hardware is very limited. I have only bought one X86 system in my
   life (described below) though I had inherited a couple previously.

   Can you make any suggestions about what to get, what to avoid,
   where to buy, where not to buy, etc.?

   I am considering something like this, with an added 1TB HD:
   <http://www.sonnam.com/system.asp?prod_ID=SYS-SN-CLE-0005>

   I am not a gamer; the most taxing use I have for the video card is
   probably playing DVDs and YouTube downloads.

   I do care about sound quality (all my music is on my HD), but I
   don't care about a lot of features. (I don't even want the ability
   to mix sound sources; I want only my music to be heard. The
   computer should otherwise be silent apart from the PC speaker.)



   Current hardware (bought March 2002, RAM and HDDs upgraded)

   P4 1.6GHz
   1GB DDR RAM
   Nvidia Riva TNT2 32MB
   IDE drives:
     160 GB
     250 GB
     500 GB
   17" CRT monitor


   I have the following running at all times:

   20 desktops (WindowMaker, 2 banks of 10)
   9 rxvt terminal windows:
           3 local shell
           1 alpine
           1 slrn
           1 root shell
           3 ssh to remote
   emacs - user, 3 windows
   emacs - root, 1 window
   2 gentoo file managers
   oowriter - 2+ windows (until book is finished -- a few more weeks)



-- 
   Chris F.A. Johnson, webmaster         <http://woodbine-gerrard.com>
   ===================================================================
   Author:
   Shell Scripting Recipes: A Problem-Solution Approach (2005, Apress)
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