Max, Let me know how the new E machines hold up. I find a lot of the old ones discarded here in northern Westchester Co., NY. These machines were typically sold through Tiger Direct and Comp USA and ran an AMD K6-2 380mhz processor. The motherboard seems to be the weakest part. Scavenging can have its rewards for the tinkerer, such as I. This past bulk trash season, which ended in October, netted me a 17" Sony Trinitron (crt) monitor in perfect working condition (which I currently use) and an original iMac model B 233mhz G3 complete, with only a loose connection in one of the harnesses. Also found some PII and AMD K6 and PI based computers (most partially stripped, but good for parts). I found a surplus computer parts dealer online and ordered a socket 370 motherboard for less than $50. I purchased a new Via C3 900 mhz processor and fan from Tiger Direct fo about $70. So for about $120, I was able to build my new computer, I already had the rest of the parts. Where as most motherboards typically have two IDE channels (for four IDE devices), this one also has, onboard, two RAID channels for a total of eight IDE devices. As currently completed, it has 256mb sdram, 40 gb hdd, 36x cdrom, 16x10x40x cdrw, and fdd. I'm mostly using it for archiving my music collection of field recordings and long out of print vinyl lps to cd with Roxio Platinum. When I'm able to find 5 identical cdrws at a good price, I'll buy a full tower case and repackage this computer with the 5 cdrws in place of the one I'm currently using. If all goes well I should able to do mass copying of my own original cds. I found a shareware program online called Feurio. It's a free download, full version, with no time limit. This s/w allows multiple copying from a single source or multiple copying jobs all running simultaneously. I haven't had the opportunity to try this s/w yet. There are a lot of cheap new and recertified computers out there, but I don't know how well they'll perform or last. They may not be the fastest, but some appear to be bargains.

Duane.