[geeks] Info for Cheap/Acceptable PC upgrades

[William Barnett-Lewis]

Having stayed away from PC's for awhile except for work and my SunPCi,
I'm not as up as I used to be on the current crop of economy upgrades.
Tips are requested...

Here's the deal, at my office we are being transitioned from NT 4
workstations to Citrix terminals (they get quite annoyed when I say I
could have kept the NCD Xterms we had prior to NT and given them the
same result, but I digress.) and the old PC's can be taken home for
personal use if the disk is wiped. So, I may have my hands on a free
PIII/450mhz wintel box. It's got on board video (4mb ati chip of some
ilk), on board sound (ghu only knows), 256mb of ram, cdrom, floppy,
ethernet, USB, and a 6gb IDE disk. My intent is only to use it as a
gaming box - flight sims, RPGs like Wizardry, turn based war games like
Steel Panthers, the occasional FPS (Medal of Honor happened to fall in
my lap the other day for $.80 US in an asian country, for ex) and
Virtual Game Station are what I expect to play. 

Obviously a cheap WD (as there is no critical data involved) IDE 40gb or
so drive will get slapped in quickly. But beyond that, what are cheap,
yet of acceptable quality, upgrades for the video and things like
joysticks? Also, which is the best MS (bletch) OS for this kind of thing
these days? I have copies of 98, 98se, ME, 2000 Pro, XP Home, and XP Pro
hiding in my pile. I really only have any experience with 98se as that's
what I run on my SunPCi card. 

Certainly the Flight Sims would all love a card with obscene amounts of
RAM - Xplane and it's OpenGL certainly would. But I'd like to find a
split the difference and keep it cheap solution. With a 5 month old now
in the house, the computer budget is real slim.

Thanks all,

William
-- 
You better watch out    What you wish for;
It better be worth it   So much to die for.
                                Courtney Love