To add to John's list, I run Win 2000 Pro, XP, and Win 7, and not only does their performance degrade slowly but sure until I have to reboot (and even Win7 takes 2+ minutes, not 30 seconds before it's running again) but having to close all my apps & reboot after most updates and then try to remember everything I was working on just irks me to this day. Fine at a job if you're getting paid to do busy-work but not for someone who actually wants to get something done with their computers. I also run two Linux boxes: my main "home" machine, behind the firewall, is a Dell Optipex-series Pentium-II 450Mhz running Red Hat 7.3 w/SW RAID. John didn't mention that hardware RAID cards have an inherent flaw (which burned me once and killed a startup company) - if the card goes bad but doesn't die or give warning, it can spew bad data on your drives. Anyway, my point was that you can run SW RAID on a 450Mhz machine built in 1997 and installed in 1998 just fine if you just want to mirror two drives, which has the bonus of taking care of cloning for you! I've been running that Optiplex box for 11 years now, and it's only gone down 4-5 times over the years, always due to power failures that my UPS couldn't outlast. The current uptime is 421 days and counting. Good list John! :thumbsup: Cheers, Rob V.