sol - Windows XP and Linux (Ubuntu)

This machine was built for an 8 year-old, and is primarily for net surfing and gaming. The games are not very resource-intensive, so thus it was built fairly inexpensively, with an eye on future upgrades.

Based on the excellent book Building the Perfect PC, and online resources at hardwareguys.com, the following components were chosen:

All components were ordered from Newegg, except for the power supply, which was purchased from buy.com. The latter was ordered separately due to confusion over whether the case comes with a power supply. (The answer: no.) Total cost of the machine came to slightly less than $600.

Building the machine was straightforward. The Antec case was very easy to work with, and all components fit well. Even proceeding very cautiously, total time was under an hour and a half.

Booting and installing Windows XP turned out to be problematic. Windows recognized the SATA drive, but the BIOS would not. So the installation would seem to go fine, with the drive recognized, formatted, and copied to, but on reboot Windows would complain that it could not find the boot disk. The SATA drive would not be listed among those autodetected, but it would eventually be detected by the BIOS, apparently, and it could also be done "manually" in the BIOS setup, by selecting the given IDE device and running it.

When instead of the SATA drive, an IDE (parallel ATA) drive was used, installation went fine and the system successfully rebooted into Windows. However, the network and audio devices were not recognized. This was fixed by installing the drivers from the CD that accompanied the motherboard.

With the Windows installation complete, Linux was installed, specifically, the Ubuntu distribution, which was chosen for its ease of use and friendly interface. Other than a couple of nonintuitive configuration options -- such as how to (re)partition the disk -- installation was quick and trivial. Notably, unlike Windows, Ubuntu had no problem detecting the network and sound cards. Despite my preference for Fedora, I would have no problem recommending Ubuntu to any user, especially those seeking a sleeker, more minimal distribution.

The only remaining issue with this machine was a very long boot time, on the order of 3-4 minutes from power up to OS selection. I'd long assumed that the problem was with the motherboard and/or the BIOS, but by widening my search (Google) criteria, I found this, from which I realized that the problem was with a jumper on the hard drive that was left in the master position after the HDD and the DVD-ROM were put onto two separate cables, and thus were no longer master and slave.