[TriLUG] seeking hardware advice...

[Lisa Lorenzin]

so i'm finally going to upgrade my main home machine (currently a p233
with 128Mb RAM and 10Gb of disk space - which was given to me by a friend
when HE upgraded).  i could really use a little hardware advice, because
the only thing i know about hardware is to go check ars technica and tom's
hardware. :)
  
a little background: i don't game.  i use my pc for image and sound
editing (now you see why i want to upgrade!), web surfing, and various
home-office stuff like word processing, balancing my checkbook, etc.

here's what i'm considering - everything except the monitor is from the
DIY guides on ars technica.

mobo		asus a7v333                     $110.99
RAM		512Mb pc2100 ddr-sdram		$98.98
cpu     	athlon xp 2000+                 $149

heatsink	alpha pal8045 w/sunon 50cfm fan $42
  or 		svc gc68 w/sunon 50cfm fan	$13

video   	gainward geforce 4 ti4200 64mb	$151
  or    	nvidia geforce ii gts pro 32mb	$55   

sound   	turtle beach santa cruz         $64.50 
hd      	western dig. wd800jb 80Gb SE    $116.99
case    	antec performanceplus 1080      $115.78
monitor 	samsung 770 tft (17" LCD)       $629

(i already have a NIC, floppy, cdr, and cdrw.)

questions:

since i don't game, do i need a high-end video card?  all i really
want is something that will do an good job of driving the lcd panel for
image editing.  would these cards be overkill for that?  if so, can anyone 
recommend a better alternative?  if not, is there an obvious choice from 
the two above, for what i want to do?

is it worth paying 4x as much for the alpha heatsink?  i'm happy to pay
the extra $30 - especially considering how much i'm dropping on this
overall - if it really buys me better cooling, but don't want to waste the
money if there's really not much difference.  i just have no idea how to
judge that kind of thing.

is there anything physical that could happen to my system that could take
out both hard drives, other than a power spike?  (i do plan to get an
industrial-strength surge suppressor.)  is there any big problem with
backing up onto a second hd, rather than external media?

my backup system currently consists of dumping important things to cd when
i think about it (ie, not often).  i'd really like to get something i can
set up to run more easily and regularly.  my first thought is just to buy
a second 80Gb drive and use it as a backup repository (via cron jobs &
afio); i don't want a raid system because i want to be able to recover
from user error as well as disk failure.  (raid doesn't help me out if i
type rm -rf * in the wrong directory.  hm, maybe mounting that second
drive read-only when i'm not actively backing up to it is a good idea,
too.)

another option, if it's important to backup onto separate media, is to get
a dvd-rw and do it manually on a regular basis.  (which i WOULD do, if i
had a good system in place.)  that's less convenient, and i expect it to
be more expensive.  (a friend of mine is sending me a recommendation for a
dvd-rw drive that he really likes - no idea yet what it costs, tho.)

any comments on the rest of the components are also welcome...

						lisa

-- 
lisa lorenzin  |  lorenzin at 1000plus.com  |  http://www.1000plus.com/lisa/
of what avail is an open eye if the heart is blind? - solomon ibn gavirol