PeterW

Is the DVD SATA ?

Disable USB in the bios during windows installation and re-enable it afterwards.

Sorry I dont think I put that in the best way! Most mid range boards have two PCI Express graphics card slots that are x16 physically but you will often find the first one offers a full 16 pci express lanes while the second one will be something like 4 pci express lanes. (Which is fine for using an additional card for more outputs) http://global.msi.com.tw/uploads/prod_cc8c66ab86b5482f3a76641a4321f8ff.jpg If you look at this board here it has two PCI Express graphics slots (physical x16), you will notice the second one is yellow to remind you it only has 4 pci express lanes available. I believe recently somebody on here had multi monitor problems in vista when using cards that used different drivers. I know we have had customers use a pair of low end nvidia cards to get four display outputs, something like 2x Geforce 7300LE or 2x Geforce 8600 etc.

As said already Core 2 Duo E6750 P35 Chipset board with dual grpahics card slots (most will be a 16x & 4x PCI express dual slot config which is no problem if your using for an extra gfx card to get more displays) MSI/Asus/Abit/Intel/Gigabyte all pretty good 2GB Ram (cheap at the moment would be rude not to have at least 2GB) 500GB SATA HDD SATA DVDRW

Agreed Intel still have some educational work to do here.

Have you tried low level formatting it ? Zero fill etc?

That CPU is almost phased out now as better performing lower powered chips arrive. You could get a Celeron 440 2.0Ghz 35W as an eqiv or maybe better Pentium E Dual Core 2140 1.6Ghz its about £10 more than the old P4 3.0Ghz.

All current novatech notebooks are uniwill and clevo chassis so you have two quite big players there! Other chassis used have been; gericom (uniwill mitac) mitac msi movita

As stated above its just making sure the drivers for the hardware are available and most importantly the DOS network drivers to make the workstation build disk. If you have your rm hardware support packs upto date and have DOS lan drivers available you should be good to go. The most fun I have had was getting the build disk working with the nvidia nforce networking controller which was fun. We have had customers use; Realtek 8139 based controllers Realtek 8110 PCI Bus Lan Realtek 8111 PCI-E bus Lan nvidia nforce networking controller (not recommended 8O ) VIA Rhine II VIA Velocity GB Lan Most Intel work fine any of those and you should be ok.

Well I have no doubt they will sell, Apple has a target market and i'm sure plenty will jump on the bandwagon. Just not for me

Just becuase you dont use them doesnt mean other poeple dont use them, thats why there are many different mobile phone models for different people and market positions. Its a bit sad but the 5mp camera on my N95 is currently the best dc I own , its handy becuase it fits in my pocket and is always good to go as I wouldnt normally carry a digital camera around with me. then you dont need a smart phone then, there is nothing wrong or right about this its just what meets your requirements. I'm looking forward to using skype on my phone in the near future so I could make calls to taiwan / europe for nothing which would be handy. Also make good use of Pico drive mega drive emulator and scumm vm as well as countless other software all of which make the train a little more comfortable. All these products will fit some kind of market position, I'm sure a company like apple would have done thier homework on this and made decisions based from this etc. Apple tends to have very good marketing so I'm sure thye wont struggle to sell the iPhone.

Style is a big seller sometimes and a lot of people will value it over substance anyday (not me!) £300-£400 would not be alot if it was available on contract. Quoted for the truth!

And no 3G or HSDPA (to the benefit of the battery life) think I will stick with my N95 (as long as I remember to charge it everyday) and hurry up with the new firmware Nokia!

Do you have an antenna availabe so that you can use some hardware TV tuner maybe USB or PCMCIA/PC Card or do you mean IPTV over the internet?

Full spec here

It looks quite pretty especially for clevo

There are plenty of dual input screens about in the 20"-22" size some are dual DVI and others will have 1x VGA and 1x DVI. A friend of mine just purchased this Samsung and is very happy with it. He uses the DVI from his PC and the VGA from his XBOX 360. It cost about £230 inc.

I find honesty tends to be the best policy.

No problem I'm glad it worked out for you.

The 975X is the premium ($) version of the P965 which has a slightly better memory controller but to be honest the P965 is newer and has better USB & RAID performance but is being phased out by the P35 which is 65nm so runs a little cooler and will support the up coming 45nm cpus due out towards the end of the year. I would look for a P35 board I have my eye on P35 Platinum but I have heard good things about the eqiv ASUS Abit models also. Intel chipsets at the moment go like Premium 975X > X38 (Due soon) High end P965 > X35 (Out now) Check out tomshardware here & here Just thought getting another 939 board would be a quick simple fix if you could find one cheap with a similar chipset so you wont have to reinstall your os. There are benefits for sure

Check out Intel P965 or P35 chipset mainboards with 2x PCI-E slots, you will need DDR2 ram which is dirt cheap at the moment so grab 2GB or more of that. Core 2 Duo E6000 series would be good (there is a refresh coming up on 22nd july they are moving the E6000 series to 1333fsb) or if you are on a budget E4400 is a pretty decent chip for the money IMHO. Or you could pick up a replacement skt 939 mainboard with 2x PCI-E slots and another VGA card. Soon I will be dumping my Athlon 64 3500, mainboard (it has 2x PCI-E by the way) & 2x 512MB DDR in favor of a Intel P35 chipset based board with 2GB (poss 4GB) of decent DDR2 ram and hopefully a 2.3Ghz E6550 Core 2 Duo.

They need the Microsoft get genuine kit. (its called something like that)

Cant see that exact model on ASUS website, are you sure thats what it is called? Anyways its a mid-high end board designed for one or more graphics cards. As such there will be no onboard graphics you will need to install at least one graphics card (be it PCI or PCI Express) to be able to use it. You will also have to connect power to the ATX 12V 4 Pin (2x2 pin) connector. There used to be adaptors from a standard 4 pin molex to ATX 12V but I havent seen one in a while your most likly going to need a new power supply.

You cant use a 2007 key on 2003, just install 2003 with your 2003 VL key that you were originally issued with.

We tend to find Primary schools buy either the cheapest they can so that they can cost in some spare complete notebooks but we have also had customers get behind the ASUS validated by Intel notebooks we assemble ourselves, the initial cost is a little more than the cheapo notebooks but the idea is that they are standards based so the parts should be cheaper and interchangable between other validated by Intel notebooks (Models from Compal, Quanta, ASUS & other manufacturers joining soon). As always its a horses for courses kind of situation