I've been working with computers since 1976, everything from mainframes & compilers to lots of PC user apps. I've never "bought" a computer, only building mine myself. I've never done a Windows "Upgrade," only doing clean installs with each new version that I've bought. When my (now) wife moved in, I built a computer for her, and ever since I've always built both of ours at the same time & exactly the same hardware and setup (don't want to have to keep 2 sets of driver disks).

Her computer died (a several-years-old P3-800 with 640 MB RAM) several weeks ago. It would have been easy enough to have replaced the power supply, but it was a good excuse to upgrade! So, we've now got ASUS motherboards with built-in graphics & sound & ethernet (I'm basically opposed to such built mb's, but it's cheaper and the technology seems ok). Plus, our u-processors are AMD 64 Athlon dual-core 3 ghz CPUs, and I've loaded on 8 GB RAM (it was cheaper than I'd imagined!).

This all went well, until I tried to boot up using the original IDE drives from the old computers. Wouldn't you know it? MS-Windows XP Pro had a real problem. I had to "re-activate" the OS, and even then, I couldn't do it online & had to call it in. But, even that didn't work & I had to get a rep to do it personally. Not once, but with BOTH of my authentic, separately purchased & licensed copies! It took two hours to do what didn't need to be done at all.

All that misery, along with the cheap price of hardware, and the free distributions of Linux prompted me to build a server for the house. I'm running Ubuntu Server 8.10 on a hardware platform exactly like the two WinXP Pro desktops, but with a faster processor (I grabbed the wrong box off the shelf), and only 4 GB RAM. But, it's got 1 80 GB SATA3 drive for the OS, and 4 250 GB SATA3 drives in a RAID5 array for the data. And, I've got a couple of extra 80 GB SATA3 drives (to eventually replace the old IDEs in the desktops) that I'm using for different Linux operating systems, so I can see which one I like the best without having to completely wipe out one to try another!!!