My primary workstation is a 3 and a half year old Dell XPS M1710 laptop and it is getting old - the 320 Gb hard drive is getting small and slow, the 3 Gb or RAM (expanded from 2 Gb) look too small and screen is turning brown in one corner. Also dead or dying: keyboard (after cat+coffee incident), built-in speakers, battery, power adapter (twice replaced), DVD writer (rads but does not write any more) and fans (one replaced, one getting louder by the week). Also the video card is a bit slow for nowadays needs.

So I set aside some money and started considering the options. In short, I could get another laptop OR get a regular computer for the same price but with twice the power. After considering all the laptop options up to 1000LVL, I decided to get a regular computer and if/when I'll need to travel I'll either take one of the old laptops with me or get a new netbook.

Now comes the fun part - choosing the components!

So far my choices are as follows:

• 1080p LCD/TN monitor with a built-in DVB-T TV receiver, around 23" - around 180 LVL (comparable options without the TV receiver are around 50 LVL cheaper, getting an extra digital TV in the house is a nice extra)


• Intel Core i5 processor and a corresponding motherboard from ASUS with 4 RAM slots and 1 video card slot (I like ASUS hardware and the TurboBoost technology of i5 sounds a very nice alternative to buying a high-Ghz dual core setup) - 125 LVL + 80 LVL


• NVidia 250GTS video card (for my WoW raiding fun) - 60 LVL


• 2*2Gb of DDR3 1600 KINGSTON RAM with lifetime warranty, leaving 2 slots for expansion later - 60 LVL


• 1 Tb HDD (Samsung Spinpoint F3 HD103SJ got great scores in recent digital times reviews) - 55 LVL


• Chieftec 500W PSU and case (good experience with them so far and good reviews) - 70 LVL


• Blueray player with DVD-RW (why not at this price?) - 60 LVL

And that is it - a great setup that will last me a few years for around 700 LVL and it will have more partial upgradability than my laptop that I paid twice as much 3 years ago.

Any tips? Did I miss anything? Is it likely that anything in the above list will cause me any trouble in latest Ubuntu/Debian installations?

Update: got all of the above, except 500 Gb HDD of the same kind (faster, cooler, but higher price per Gb) and no Blueray (no drive in LV at the moment and did not want to wait a few weeks). The results are good, but I wish I would have gone with a 5 LVL more expensive video card that has a quieter cooler. Now I am buying a separate video card cooler for around 20 LVL that will be both more efficient and much quieter than the stock cooler I have - Zalman VF1000 is the model. Has not arrived yet.

P.S. It looks like updating a post in WP, automatically bumps it back into the Planet feed. Sorry :(