Out of touch, build advice needed please!

Hi all. I've recently been having no end of issues with my PC, largely related to Win XP and SP3, so have decided to hang it all and do a new OS install. I think 3 years is pretty damn good for a windows install, I remember the days when I was lucky to get 6 months... anyway I digress.

I haven't upgraded for over 3 years (currently Athlon XP 2600+ system) so I'm going to go Vista and get some new hardware in the process. Luckily I've just inherited the following:

Abit AV8 3rd-Eye
Athlon 64 3500+ newcastle

This puts me in a sticky position as I'm not up to date on several "new" technologies (sata, raid, 64 bit-ness etc) and despite all my best efforts, trying to read up on 3 years of progress is giving me a headache. I've got a budget of around £100 / $200 (although the cheaper the better) to buy a new disk(s), new case and possibly new ram and/or cd-dvd writer. Sorry in advance for the small essay which follows. In terms of performance, I do play some games (geforce 6800gt) but I'm more concerned about how well windows and applications will run, especially secuirty software (zonealarm currently).

Area of uncertainty 1: my mobo supports sata-150 and raid 0/1. I've got a pata-133 drive in my machine now which I'm going to move over for storage space, but I want to get a nice quick sata windows drive. Is it worth my while buying two 80gb drives for a raid 0 setup, or on my kind of budget should i just forget raid and spend similar money on a single 360gb drive? The extra space would be nice and I'm wondering if raid 0 is really going to give me an appreciable performance increase. Also, I take it just about every sata-300 drive on the market will have a jumper which will pull it down to 150?

Area of uncertainty 2: my mobo supports 2 dimm single channel ddr 400, and 4 dimm dual channel ddr 400. I have to install matched pairs right? How fussy is my mobo likely to be about this? I have two identical sticks of crucial 512mb ddr400 already so they are going in, but i also have a single stick of kingston kvr 512mb ddr400 and a single stick of corsair 512mb ddr333 kicking around. Could I just slap all this in, be limited to ddr333 speeds and get on with it (is this even compatible with my cpu fsb?)? Or would I be better off investing in another stick of kingston? Or will the mobo be so picky that even if the chips are different on the same brand and type of ram it's going to give me problems? I really don't want to end up with only 1gb of usable ram...

Area of uncertainty 3: I have no idea of what case to buy, beyond atx form factor. Considerations are the size of the tower cupboard in my pc desk (I think I have a midi tower at the moment) and the size of the huge asus star ice cooler I've inherited. Can anybody recomend a roomy tardis-esque case?

Area of uncertainty 4: Should I really go for it and invest in an athlon 64 x2 right now, rather than leave it and make this upgrade in the future? What the hell am I doing with regards to this whole crazy 64 number and what does it mean for my operating system choice? Is there an idiots guide to the 64bit revolution somewhere?

Area of uncertainty 5: Is it worth my time upgrading my emprex ide cd-dvd writer for a sata model? Will I see any real improvement in performance? I'm kind of keen anyway as the drive is white and I'm unlikely to buy a white case... any brand/model suggestions welcome!



Phew. If anybody can help point me in the right direction I would really appreciate it. Specific hardware recommendations would be great, or conversely what to avoid would be useful too. Fingers crossed that there are people out there with the patience to reply!