Our old PII-266 box is no longer meeting my wife's needs. Time for a new box. Her imminent requirements include editing hi-res scans of photographs and complex graphics, using the GIMP, and working on documents in OpenOffice.org. We are not gamers and are not interested in editing video (nor in watching videos on her PC).
I am not impressed by the offerings of mass-market electronics/appliance houses. I have envisioned an AMD-64 machine with 1G or more of RAM, a modest video card (enough video RAM to hold one or two screens) and sound card and lots of disk space. Trouble is, the only local assembler I'd trust builds only with Intel chips. I don't think waiting for Intel to come out with their version of the Athlon 64 is an option. Do you recommend sticking with the Pentium series and the local assembler (who tell me they're happy to build specifically for Linux), or forging ahead with Athlon-64 from some place like Quay Computers (I'm more familiar with Wellington than with Christchurch)? If the latter, is there a shop or shops in Christchurch that you particularly recommend above all others? TIA for your advice, =====Andrew
