>I gotta ask... how much Won did this much Wang set you back? I'm

Well, if I hadn't fscked up, I think it came in less than $1K. And costs have dropped a bit - look at http://www.pricewatch.com/

>ATX case W/300 watts
>Slot 1 or A motherboard ATX formfactor
>800 - 1.4 gig clockspeed on the CPU

If you're going Athlon it'll be Socket A - they don't do Slot A anymore. Though there are still some old Slot A chips out there - 700-750-800MHz. 850MHz-1.6Ghz are all Socket A. At this point you'd probably want an Athlon XP. I'd recommend that instead of an older Athlon - the XP has the Palomino core which performs a bit better for a given clock speed, runs a bit cooler, and has an extended instruction set.

If you went with Intel (why?), it wouldn't be Slot 1. The P4 has a new Socket (Socket 4-something-or-other), and the PIII went to sockets too.

>256k ram

My advice - with the price of RAM right now, buy as much as you can afford. If you're going with an Athlon you'll get better performance if you buy a MB that uses DDR SDRAM instead of SDRAM, especially with a 266MHz FSB instead of 200MHz. You'll pay a bit more for DDR, but not that much - and, in any case, RAM prices are WAY down right now. My board will take up to 4GB of RAM, but the price curve swings sharply after 256MB DIMMs, so it wasn't worth it. Besides, like I'm going to do anything that would use more than 1GB anyway.

>AGP, 3 PCI, 1 ISA slots minimum

ISA? Why? Most of the better boards these days don't have ISA anymore. Better to just get all PCI unless you have an old ISA card you just can't give up. My board has 1 AGP and 6 PCI, a lot of them have 1 AGP and 5 PCI.

>EIDE

Pretty much any MB will have that - look for ATA/100 and get drives that are ATA/100 if possible.

>In order to save money I'm looking at transplanting the Disks,
>monitors and keyboards I'm using now.... and I don't want to loose the
>data I've got. I need to put together 2 of them, too, on a very
>limited budget.

Well, monitors, keyboards, mice, etc should be no problem. Well, as long as the KB and mouse is PS/2 - pretty much all systems have those connectors.

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