CDog

I too would highly recommend DiskKeeper

That's exactly what I do, only with 200GB Maxtors...

Your desired specification seems very low for someone with a budget of up to £3000. I use my computer for music and graphics. On the music side of things, I use... Yamaha DS2416 which is a 32bit 96,000Hz 16 channel digital mixing board based on the Yamaha O2RYamaha SW1000XG which is a mother of a Audio/MIDI card - internally cable linked to the DS2416 Yamaha AX-44 which is an I/O unit which is internally cable linked to the DS2416 ...which when I bought them five years ago, totalled £1200. Needless to say, they're very good, even if Yamaha aren't so hot with driver support at times. You could still pop the Audigy in there as well. As for HDD space - if you're getting two SATA disks then make them 200GB because you can never have too much space. I have a SATA Maxtor 200GB /w 8MB cache on which everything runs, with a same spec PATA Mactor 200GB /w 8MB cache disk for storage. It may seem huge to start with but really it isn't.

Since I upgraded to a HT enabled P4 - XP has really come into a league of it's own and especially with some of the applications I run which support hyped threading processes - such as LightWave3D - it's as good as having an entry level, dual processor workstation...especially if you have a GB of good fast memory and a SATA HDD

Well even 55c average is high - I'd suggest you get a better cooler and follow the information people above have posted. I have a P4 3.0CGHz /w HT and cool it with a ThermalRight SP94 CPU Cooler averaging about 34c...

Why not do something a little more...adventerous?

Yeah, except they're called equalisers...not operating systems...

I simply reboot...

Sadly, in all probability, they will honestly believe they're selling an air guitar...though I doubt that before going ahead with this, they checked inside the case to see it's in good condition... No offense.

My Nikon's macro range goes down to 1cm - not that I've found much use for that ability just yet. Anyway, the macro symbol (flower) is fairly standard on all cameras .

Nikon Coolpix 5400 here Also got an old Olympus C2000 which is an excellent camera, even today.

I can't think why, if other than the Internet, you can do everything else on the LAN from the laptop. Wouldn't be anything to do with a firewall you've forgotten to add the laptop's IP to perhaps? We recently purchased an all-singing-all-dancing Sony laptop ((P4-3.0GHz)) with wireless LAN but after assigning the IP, I only had to plug the RJ45 cable in and everything worked fine - inlcuding accessing the Internet.

Great idea, well done - hope Microsoft doesn't announce they've added this tomorrow

Heehee, hey it is a good effort though

Now THAT is smart