Whereby ‘affordable’ means not much more expensive than 500 Euros.

In general

I’d prefer for the machine to be somewhat quiet. I don’t need a powerhouse, and I don’t want fans spread all over the case reminding me every passing minute that there’s a machine below my desk. IOW, passive cooling, where possible, is preferred.

The machine is to be x86-based, preferably an Athlon64 since I’ve just had a good first-hand experience myself, and have also heard very good things about them from peers. I am looking to run Windows XP Professional as well as a user- and development-friendly Unix of some sort on it. I don’t seek comments on whether Windows is a good operating system, but as for x86 Unixes, I’m admittedly out of the loop.

Unix systems?

• I hear Ubuntu and Fedora have recently become the most prominent user-friendly, free of charge distributions. However, Fedora has such unniceties as not providing MP3 support out of the box and using RPM as packaging format, which everyone seems to agree is rather horrible. Ubuntu, on the other hand, is Debian-based, which isn’t exactly my favorite either. I’d rather have something with a Gentoo Portage-style packaging system, which I’m very fond of while on Mac OS X (using Gentoo Mac OS), but if that means going through days of trying to set up Gentoo Linux, then thanks, but no thanks. Unless tay, your local Gentoo fan, is to help me.
• Mandriva (née Mandrake), on the other hand, hasn’t been so hot on the news lately. Undeservedly so?
• Should it be Linux at all? What about FreeBSD? What about its user-oriented recent sibling, PC-BSD?
• I won’t even give KDE a chance of proving me wrong as for my opinion on its Usability, but GNOME sure has picked up a lot lately. It’s a little slow though, but then again, I was testing it on a Celeron 600. Is its performance good for daily use? What about e.g. XFce? What about something crazy, e.g. XPDE?
• Honorable mentions of OpenSolaris and Darwin go here.

CPU

I’ve recently set up a server, and its Athlon64 3000+ (1.8 GHz, I believe) seemed more than good enough for anything I’d want to use my desktop for. However, more can never hurt, of course, and this machine should survive a few years.

Mainboard and basic I/O features

The server has an MSI Neo4 Platinum motherboard (with an nVidia nForce 4 chipset), which has good documentation and some feature niceties, including BIOS updates from within Windows. However, it is fairly server-centric (despite apparently being marketed at consumers), in that it features a PCI-X slot, three (!) PCI Express slots, four Serial ATA ports and semi-hardware RAID (NVRAID) on them. Not exactly something I’m going to need.

I’d be fine with two Serial ATA ports, one PCI Express slot and just ordinary PCI in case I need to add, say, um. To tell you the truth, I wouldn’t even know what I’d need PCI for.

1 GiB of RAM should probably be enough.

Graphics

For a GPU, I personally prefer ATi brand-wise, although I’m told their drivers tend to suck more than nVidia’s. I definitely would like this component to be passively-cooled. It needs a DVI-D (or -I, for that matter) slot and 1680×1050 as supported resolution. Don’t really care about S-Video out, although I suppose it may be useful when wanting to watch a movie on a TV.

Audio

Modern mainboards seem to have decent-quality sound on-board. To my knowledge, Amanda has no HiFi with optical in, so I’ll need neither optical out nor S/PDIF out, or anything like that. I don’t plan on buying an expensive HiFi any time soon, thankyouverymuch. But please, please give me audio quality that’s at least on par with what my iPod has. I don’t need no static.

Storage

I honestly can’t say whether I want to get a floppy drive on this machine.

I’m happy with Samsung’s recent hard drive offerings; they seem as fast as they are silent. So, I’d like to choose a hard drive with somewhere between 100 and 250 GB, with a budget of about 100 Euros.

Finally, I should probably be getting a DVD burner with this one. Dual-layer? I don’t know if/why I should care. I also couldn’t care less whether it burns with 4 times, 8 times or even more, as long as it gets the job done.

Peripherals

• An old FireWire hard drive enclosure. I might EOL this, however. It’s slow, ugly, loud and, for all intents and purposes pretty useless now. It’s a LaCie, and seems to have worked fine for now without drivers.
• An IceCube Pleiades FireWire+USB2 combo hard drive enclosure. Again, seems to work without any drivers.
• A first-generation iPod mini, connected usually via USB2.
• A Canon PowerShot A80 digital camera, connected via USB1. Driver required on Windows 2000, but not on XP, I believe. Certainly not on Mac OS X. Supports PTP.
• A Philips ToUCam Fun with weird outdated but somewhat working official drivers for Windows 2000 and XP, and no drivers for Mac OS X, via USB1. Two third-party solutions exist; one is slow, buggy and open source, and the other costs a lot of money I’m not willing to pay for this generally crappy piece of hardware.
• A Labtec Ultra Flat keyboard, via USB1.
• A Typhoon Pocket mouse, via USB1.
• A DELL UltraSharp 2005FPW display, preferredly via DVI.

All of the above better be supported flawlessly on Windows XP. I don’t care so much about some of the hardware (e.g. the webcam) working on whatever Unix I end up choosing.

Intended Usage

Mainly, the machine will be used for general desktop purposes — browsing, writing texts, etc., especially when my laptop is unavailable for whatever reason. Secondarily, the machine will be used for Usability studies as well as development.

The only tasks that will beg for some power will be watching movies, burning CDs/DVDs, and similar. Playing games will be the exception rather than the rule.

Conclusion

Did I forget anything?

Oh, right. Where to shop in Canada? Does NewEgg ship there? Is that bound to cause warranty issues? Any other recommendations?

In general, I’d appreciate any kinds of pointers, experiences and help. Comments like “dude, Windows suckz, just go with Linux full-time” aren’t appreciated, however, since I depend on using Windows for Usability research as well as for application development. My main OS is and will remain Mac OS X anyway.