Someone asked about A series AMD machines a while ago. I kept quiet because I was in the process of getting one. Here is the spec: MBO ASUS® F2A55-M LE CPU AMD A8-5600K Quad Core APU (3.6GHz) & Radeon™ HD 7560D Graphics MEM 4GB SAMSUNG DUAL-DDR3 1333MHz SDA 120GB INTEL® 330 SERIES SSD, SATA 6 Gb/s '/' & /home' SDB 180GB INTEL® 330 SERIES SSD, SATA 6 Gb/s '/audio' & '/source' I've now spent a few days getting it exactly as I want it. I made very few BIOS changes. I disabled serial and parallel ports (the machine doesn't have them anyway) and set the CPU to 'performance'. Initially I disabled the on-board sound as I'm using my trusty 2496. But I got occasional boot oddities so re-enabled it. I installed a minimal debian-squeeze without any problems at all, then just added the software I wanted. This was a bit harder than I expected as my notes from last time were not complete, and going from Linux 2.6 to 3.1 meant there were subtle differences, especially with stuff I had to compile. The machine is very, very responsive and almost completely silent. The PSU has a slow running 120mm fan and the cooler on the CPU looks like something from a space lab! With the stock 3.1 kernel I'm running at a latency of 5.8mS with no x-runs even when going full steam on Rosegarden (with audio tracks) and Yoshimi. Sequencer + synth playing of complex material that used to peak at around 70% total processor, now peaks at around 20%! I did try the 3.2 kernel, both stock and RT but both of these actually performed far worse, and I had to run with a latency of 23.2mS to get clear of x-runs. My old computer has been re-purposed as a (rather fast) office machine, so that involved a lot of file swapping and checking that nothing was missed. Now, I suppose I'd better get on and compose some music :) -- Will J Godfrey http://www.musically.me.uk Say you have a poem and I have a tune. Exchange them and we can both have a poem, a tune, and a song.