I have been given a challange by My wife. I bought her a "debranded" HP desktop from one of the local folks last year or the year before. We put SuSE 9.1 on it. She has a Brother MFC unit (Printer, fax, scanner) and Connects via Modem. using Telecom ottawa. She has a plain Panasonic 17 inch CRT monitor that is quite satifcatory. She hates her current system! She has had occasional problems connecting to http://www.ishares.com/ which resulted in her falling back to her old Windows 95 machine. The linux box did not connect while the W95 box did. The other day the same thing happened with http://globeinvestor.com/ She would like sound working in full duplex. The built in sound on the HP motherboard does not work, we tried a SB live card, but the HP would not shut off its built-in card so the SB live won't work for her. We had to play arround to get the Brother MFC to print, finaly manualy configuring for a previous version of the Brother printer, She is not sure if the printer is working as well as it can, and has not attempted to make use of the scanner function. The other day someone sent her a PDF file which for some reason would not open on her system, even though it worked fine on my machine (Suse 10) and again she had to open the files in the old Win95 nachine and print them on the old panasonic printer on that machine. The PDF files in question were made with Acrobat Distiller 6.0.1 from a Corel office document on a windows machine. She had a slight panic as these concerned a legal matter and she had to print them sign and return them the same day. She has threatend to throw the machine in the laneway and run it over with her Minivan. I noticed an Advertisment for a place called Monarch Computers in the last linux Journal, http://www.monarchcomputer.com/ but they firstly have a confusing site,a nd second they list Linux as "install Only" with it not being clear if they would be sure that everything is properly working. Their site is also confusing and seems to only have AMD 64 machines. My last system I bought was a Student special from PC Cyber, a couple of years ago, (AMD 1800+) and it is only after an upgrade or three that I have everything working on mine, at that I have never managed to record audio from an external source through the soundcard. I have a SB live card, and have the built in audio shut off. She is not interested in Games, and really Wants nothing to do with Windows, but was tempted after the last failure of those PDF's to ask if she could get Windows 98SE2 for the HP, which was the last operating system that they used where she worked shortly before she retired... I am prsonaly not a great troubleshooter, and I am up to my A** in Aligators anyway so I can not garuntee that if we buy a random system I can get it going. I will NEVER buy another HP system again, as the Bios said it turned off the sound card and the LAN card on her machine, but left them on. (She has to wait every time for a non-existant DHCP server to time out when Booting as Linux sees the LAN Card and tries to connect) After all that the chalenge. Is their anywhere she can go and get a pre-running system with KUbuntu, or Suse. (She is used to KDE by Now, and when I tried a ubuntu live disk she found the Gnome Desktop distastful.) In general is their someplace I can send anyone to buy a linux system? My Wife says taht she does not want a computer hobby, she wants to visit web site reliably. PLEASE.. -- Charles MacDonald Stittsville Ontario cmacd [ at ] TelecomOttawa [ dot ] net Just Beyond the Fringe http://www.TelecomOttawa.net/~cmacd/ No Microsoft Products were used in sending this e-mail.