I don't worry about these things anymore. I do tend to buy at the high end of hardware then grind them to death, about 4 years. I did this recently the only problem I had was the video card which I had to run Ubuntu hardy on, BTW works great except that flash randomly crashes on AMD 64.
Sometimes you can get stung but consider that the developers playing with the kernel will generally have good gear because it really is their first love. Ken -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
