Components for "budget performance" system for nongamer?

[DanKegel]

My wife is a heavy user of very vanilla apps like
Office '97, Firefox, Thunderbird, Dreamweaver, Acrobat Reader,
and Photoimpact. She uses an old PCI video card, and
that's fine. But her system is getting old, time
to replace it. I have a web page with notes on my search at
http://kegel.com/new-computer-2008.html

I'm going to reuse the old case, dvd drive, video card, and monitor, so
I only need to pick out CPU, RAM, hard drive, and motherboard;
I'd like 'em all to be as big and fast as is possible for $100 or so each.
The only other important detail is the system has to be able to
dual boot Windows XP and the latest Ubuntu Linux.

The sweet spot for CPUs seems to be the Core Duo E6550
($150, specint 2000 score: about 2500, 3x faster than what she had).
The sweet spot for RAM seems to be 2GB DDR2 PC 6400 ($35).
The sweet spot for hard disk seems to be 750 GB SATA ($100).

My main question is, what motherboard? I picked one at random
for about $100, the MSI P35 Neo2-FR. It seems to have some
issues booting Linux (you have to use a boot option), but some
people seem happy. Is there a better choice? I don't think
we have any cards beyond the one PCI (yes, PCI) video card,
so we don't need lots of slots.

Thanks,
Dan

 

[ohiou_grad_06]

Not too sure about intel stuff, but how much are you wanting to spend, and do you wish to overclock? AMD is good if you are on a budget as well.

Also, Office 97 huh? How about a free upgrade.

openoffice.org

Highly recommend it. I've actually got a legit copy of Office XP that I bought and it's not even installed b/c I use open office, it will read your Word files, save to them, create pdf's from them, has it's own version of word, access, excel, visio, powerpoint, and even a math program. So full featured, and free!!!!

 

[kelfen]

Asus P5N-E SLI Motherboard - NVIDIA nForce 650i SLI, Socket 775, ATX, Audio, PCI Express, Gigabit LAN, S/PDIF, USB 2.0 & Firewire, Serial ATA, RAID For $130 Asus is a solid choice, You have the option later to upgrade to quad down the road.

 

[croc]

My wife is a heavy user of very vanilla apps like
Office '97, Firefox, Thunderbird, Dreamweaver, Acrobat Reader,
and Photoimpact. She uses an old PCI video card, and
that's fine. But her system is getting old, time
to replace it. I have a web page with notes on my search at
http://kegel.com/new-computer-2008.html

I'm going to reuse the old case, dvd drive, video card, and monitor, so
I only need to pick out CPU, RAM, hard drive, and motherboard;
I'd like 'em all to be as big and fast as is possible for $100 or so each.
The only other important detail is the system has to be able to
dual boot Windows XP and the latest Ubuntu Linux.

The sweet spot for CPUs seems to be the Core Duo E6550
($150, specint 2000 score: about 2500, 3x faster than what she had).
The sweet spot for RAM seems to be 2GB DDR2 PC 6400 ($35).
The sweet spot for hard disk seems to be 750 GB SATA ($100).

My main question is, what motherboard? I picked one at random
for about $100, the MSI P35 Neo2-FR. It seems to have some
issues booting Linux (you have to use a boot option), but some
people seem happy. Is there a better choice? I don't think
we have any cards beyond the one PCI (yes, PCI) video card,
so we don't need lots of slots.

Thanks,
Dan

You didn't mention what your primary OS would be, that may have some bearing on your dual boot options.

OTOH, any dual boot solution will be a bit of a pain, unless you go with a VM solution. Even then, there is some pain involved. I think that your 750 GB is overkill, I'd back down to a 500, say seagate 7200.11 sata. The samsung f1's are also good- fast,quiet, etc. And there is no reason to avoid PATA drives with SATA drives.

My preferred dual boot method is from BIOS. A boot manager is a piece of software, it can get corrupted.

 

[croc]

^ Again, not if you dual boot from seperate drives, via BIOS options... OP has a legacy PATA drive. Why not use it?

 

[croc]

^ chalk it up to CRC... It passed.

@ OP.. For your intendred purposes, the MSI should be as good as any, price is right. I've never dealt with their customer service, nor actually owned one of their boards, so cannot comment other than stating that several several review sites that I trust seem to think that their quality has improved as of late.