[ILUG] Replacing a desktop/server

[Timothy Murphy]

My desktop is a 450MHz Asus P3 which I bought from Educom almost 6 years ago.
It has worked and continues to work extraordinarily well.
It has two SCSI disks, plus a cheap IDE disk which I added for archiving.
I hardly ever use the machine directly,
so in effect it acts as a server for 4 other machines in the house
(5 if you include an ancient Mac that hasn't been turned on for a year).

This machine actually seems to do its job perfectly,
but I feel it must be time for a replacement,
if only to keep up with the Joneses,
and I'm wondering what would be a good machine to get.
Basically, I'd like something as reliable and as simple to run.

I bought a Targa Athlon64 machine from Lidl
on the advice of David Malone on ILUG,
and this has worked very well.
It runs WIndows-XP most of the time,
for my grand-daughter's Sims-2
and our au pair who links to her boy-friend in Spain
using IM + a webcam.
(Could one do that in Linux?)
I use a Sony Picturebook all the time.

But the Targa is not quite as reliable as the Asus.
It has occasional incomprehensible (to me) hiccups,
when I have to re-start it,
(Of course this is probably Microsoft's fault.)

I looked at the Medion in Aldi this week,
but it didn't look as good as the Targa to me,
and it was the same price (1100 euro).

So what should I get? Any suggestions?


-- 
Timothy Murphy  
e-mail (<80k only): tim /at/ birdsnest.maths.tcd.ie
tel: +353-86-2336090, +353-1-2842366
s-mail: School of Mathematics, Trinity College, Dublin 2, Ireland