Don't make the same mistake I did! On the advice of posters on this board I got a cheap 80GB IDE hard drive thinking it wasn't important because it's a trading PC so storage is not important etc. A cheap hard drive creates a bottleneck in the system that slows everything down. Get a modern SATA hard drive - something like a 250 GB Western Digital Caviar. You don't really make much of a saving for a smaller hard drive and it's probably slow and out of date. For the ultimate hard drive configuration you could run 2 x Western Digital Raptors in a RAID 0 configuration but that may be overkill. But whatever you do don't scrimp on a cheapo IDE hard drive just because of "experts" on this forum.
I build my own computers ... its fun I've only bought one computer from a retailer so far in my life. And that thing blew up on me when I first turned it on (power supply). The computer atm is kind of a hodge podge of parts; but it does the job well from what I use it for. Which is Everything ... Amd x2 4800+ 1.5 gig of ram 8800 gts 640 meg nvidia sb aud 2 4 hard-drives 3 sata and 1 ide (I'm slow to phase em out). 2 dvd roms. best advice I could probably give to people about building their own computer is to make sure to use hardrive fan(s). Nothing like having a harddrive go and lose most of your data. I was never much up for backing things up ie good luck backing up 1 terabyte of data. But I do keep mutiple compies of stuff on my various harddrives (some not in computer).
Sharkey builds a new computer every couple months.. http://www.sharkyextreme.com/guides/MHGSBG/article.php/3684486
JA_LDP... I thought Vista was the bum deal.. the only problem I thought of with x64 is the issue with 64bit driver suport are you saying there are more issues with XP X64? Let me know... PS your right with 32bit win XP 3.5 to 4GB max memory my mistake (Remember people more memory in a 32bit windows XP system is a simple waste of money)
I made a few changes, and the system has been up and running for about 1 month with no problems. I changed to an Apevia case and a 600w OCZ power supply. Waited out on the various items and picked almost all the parts up at a discount, and over half with a rebate which I 've received one so far. Total after I get the rest of the rebates will be $1075, including shipping.