Hi there, you may have seen me much more in the Windows side of these boards, I had a series of computer ills that ultimately crashed two hard drives, not the least of which was data corruption... Anyway, on the main one, I had a copy of Windows 98 SE running along with a good selection of programs without any real issues. I had a Genuine 98SE disc and manual but after I had the drive wiped with hopes to reinstall Windows 98, it suddenly asked for a product code I had been thinking was only adopted for WinXP. Anyway, this was an OEM 98 full OS disc but was asking for the key each time I tried to reinstall, and I went the route of installing MS Dos 6.2 in an attempt to upgrade from a 'healthy' looking drive with MS product on it... Still, no go. Long and short, I still have two copies of Windows that were sold used, as remainders of a long gone piece of hardware.. Sure, you can say make your bed, lie in it... and I am, but I don't know for the life of me how Windows got on the hard drive years before and I know I got the computer with only a Novell Ethernet type prompt ending up the POST screen data.

Aside from that long winded list of Microsoft woes I suffered, I have been happily using Windows on the computers I DID buy preinstalled and have not made any nefarious copies of the sacred MS product... I might add. Anyway, due to the extreme, non budging MS OS price tags, I opted to buy Novells' packaged Linux OS, SUSE.
Not sure what PC this OS will ultimately stay in, but I am going to move it to my bookPC's former Windows 98 occupied Samsung IDE 20GB HDD. The new copy of XP Home Edition I also decided to invest in is going to a 'new' 40 GB drive I threw into the Windows purchase as a 'system' (OEM was all they had left in stock, though they were not aware of this when I inquired).

Again, I'm setting up the basic first question here... The first idea is to move the 20 GB drive to a newly purchased Compaq Deskpro, that featured the Celeron 500 MHz chip, though I plan to expand this and as a resullt, not sure I will not encounter problems using SUSE Linux as a Windows alternative... I'll be looking further at the different forums and hoping you guys can guide a not-so-tech savvy gear head into appreciating both these OS systems... I'm told I made a good choice with Novells' system, or if I had chosen Linspire. the book PC mentioned before has 256MB RAM as bought, my other PCs dating to 1997 thru 2001 it appears, all can run with my 256MB (PC66/PC100)....BookPC uses PC133. The Suse package claims the minimum RAM is 256 and that seems a bit odd, as XP I thought was the power hungry monster! haha

Bill