The book has its own website, so I asked about hard disk interfaces to make sure a Seagate disk would work with an Intel mobo. Seems it will, but I now understand that SATA interfaces are Serial whereas ATA interfaces are Parallel (so why don't they call them PATA?).

I am considering buying the disk from Novatech since they seem to sell OEM operating systems cheaper than DABS and I need to buy a HDD, CPU, or some such to get the OEM deal. The above thread suggested a 7200.9 model, so I asked Novatech when they will get them in. I could pay more for a 16 Mb cache (rather than 8Mb), but I would have thought this wouldn't be much faster for non-repeated reads such as booting the sytem or loading a large application.

Better look at memory to suit the mobo next...