[dude87]

Originally Posted by mbself

Thanks.....that is great news for me. It was sort of an auction atmosphere. I didn't want any of their drives or video cards. After seeing it boot up I let them have the stuff I didn't need back. They had 2-512 meg DDR ram sticks in it and I knew I wanted to go 12gig and I couldn't use the 512's.

Very much a right place right time scenario.

I will have this beauty cleaned up and restored/built to my specs by mid July. Gotta take a vacation 1st.

Considering a "dual boot" with windows and Linux....anyone experienced with that setup?

Also, recomendations for a good video capture card that will capture AVI as well as MPEG formats that is compatible with both OS's will be appreciated.

As I said earlier, I want to be able to get set up to really help out someone with some good VHS material that needs to be digitized/enhanced and authored into a good DVD release.

Last things I need for that are a good capture card and a really good VHS deck....bidding on Panasonic AG 1980.

Can't really help with the video card questions, but a couple of things on the 32/64 bit issues and Linux/Windows dual boot.

Remember that 32 bit Windows can only address 4 GB of RAM, some of which is the RAM on your video card. 12 GB of RAM on a 32 bit operating system is not necessarily going to improve anything. It is possible to patch the Linux kernel with Physical Address Extensions (PAE) to address greater than 4 GB of memory, you may or may not want to try that as a Linux newbie (assuming you are - if you're an experienced Linux user than go for it).

As for dual-booting, I did that for a while with no problems. When I realized I never booted Windows on my torrenting machine I wiped the drive clean and installed Linux only In general, dual booting works well and has few problems, another alternative is to consider installing VMware (or something similar, such as Parallels) and running a virtual machine when you need to access Windows. Saves the rebooting time.