<div class="gmail_quote"><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;"> It's even put me in mind of setting up a separate Linux box just for audio (and possibly AV) work. Gentoo Linux has a sub-distribution explicitly designed for AV work. Ardour has been moved to this package class and isn't even available for the Linux I use on my desktop system. </blockquote></div> I'm making a machine just for this, it's also not for wusses either :^) though it looks simple than swapping out LCD's on a laptop (yes, I've never put one together).. Tiger direct is selling refurbished Nvidia i750 motherboards. That's the two slots sli with heat pipes (don't ask me what they are cooling) and potential to use fast DDR2 (I got some 1066Mhz ram). You only need about a gig, Ubuntu hardly ever hits the 1 gig limit. And a 650Watt power supply in case you want to get two 9800Gt's, which is about 80 bucks apiece now. Also Tiger Direct is selling some Pentium Extreme Edition CPU's (Overclockable 3.73 Ghz 64-bit Pentium-D's) for a hundred dollars a pop. The reason I went on this "build my own system" quest was that I got the EE for a upgrade of my 2.8Ghz PD, and found out it's incompatible.. So I made a money losing PC constructing learning experience of it. Incidently Tiger Direct is also selling a Quad core AMD barebones kit for 177 dollars now, but you want clock cycles (faster bus bandwidth = less latency). Yess I've had assembly programming and digital electronics, and I haven't built my own PC. Dell is also selling Dell Dimension 9150's (I have one, and I highly recommend it) for 280 dollars (go to dell financial services). -------------- If you separated your home from root partition, you can install ubuntu and not lose your home accounts.. That's what I do to permit myself to move between versions of Ubuntu without losing my home account.. If you didn't, get a second drive, you can use this command to backup your home partition: tar -cf - /home | (cd /the/other/drive ; tar -xf - ) It's better than "cp -r" . Reformat (into / and /home partitions) with Ubuntu 9.04 and add Ubuntu Studio (and apt-get install). You can also use "gparted" from the Ubuntu live disk to resize your partition for gentoo, and install Ubuntu on the new partition, and copy your account folders over to ubuntu (and erase gentoo, :^o ). If you have windows, I wonder if Wubi permits you to get a RT kernel and Ubuntu Studio?