> 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
More than you'd need for image editing, but then boxes are never fast enough... > sound card and lots of disk space. Trouble is, the only local assembler > I'd trust builds only with Intel chips. Tell him/her and buy elsewhere. I buy from suppliers who supply what *I* want, thank you. Out of interest, who is that? > I don't think waiting for Intel > to come out with their version of the Athlon 64 is an option. Ack. Athlons have been better bang for buck for some time. Athlon-64 leaves Intel stone-dead and Intel has nothing similar to offer. > Do you recommend sticking with the Pentium series and the local > assembler Stuff both. > or forging ahead with Athlon-64 If you can afford it, damn good move. > is there a shop or shops in Christchurch that you particularly recommend > above all others? There is PCU and Computer Future, both Washington Way. This may not be current, but PCU can't spell Linux, Computer Future only when the weather is good. PCU in general has crappier stuff. Neither makes guarantees whether the hardware will work under Linux, so I always ask myself for what exactly I pay their premium for "professional advice". If you can work out yourself what you want, I find tastech.co.nz troublefree, simple and cheap. He'll assemble the parts you pick, though it's not actuallly difficult to do it yourself in 2-3 hours and save the money. I'm always iffy with chains like HarveyNorman because I have little choice in what package they sell, the high risk of non-standard PC parts, and obviously they couldn't spell Linux if their life depended on it (and you'd have to pay the Redmond tax). As for distros, I haven't found Red Hat suitable for some while, but Mandrake and SuSE are ok. If you have an AMD-64 machine, SuSE is definitely the one to pick from those 3 as they have a well-tested 64bit version out of the box. You should subscribe to [EMAIL PROTECTED], people there have discussed at length which mobos are better than others. You can search the archive too (with google). I don't know of a commercial supplier in Christchurch who'd put his money (and guarantee) on Linux on AMD-64. HTH, Volker -- Volker Kuhlmann is possibly list0570 with the domain in header http://volker.dnsalias.net/ Please do not CC list postings to me.
