AMD's are cheaper, so you have good advice there, but in the unlikely event the heatsink falls off, they fry, whereas P4's throttle down and survive... a PIII would be okay too, if you can get one cheap, but avoid Celeron's. I'd go for the P4, but see if you can go for a 2GHz version with 478 pins; this might be greek, but it means that you might be able to upgrade your PC just with a new processor (say a P4 3GHz at Christmas 2003) at some point. If you get a P4 with 438 pins, then you will not be able to do that, as the 438 pin socket is effectively history. I might have the exact number of pins wrong, but there are two P4 sockets, and the lower numbers of pins should be avoided. Also, there are now P4 motherboards that support DDR-RAM; you were asking about bus speed; Intel is faster in this area, for the processors you're looking at.
Check the Graphics card; it should be AGPx4, 32MB, maybe 16MB at a pinch. Don't go for inbuilt graphics. For sound, well, many systems have inbuilt sound (i.e. on motherboard), but a soundcard gives you more scope for expansion and upgrading; almost any PC can take these in their PCI slots, and if they happen to have inbuilt sound, you can disable this when you fit a PCI card so you get the better sound.
Get a DVD as well as a CDRW; it makes copying disks easy (the DVD will run any CD disk), and if you get a videocard with a video out, then you have a DVD player you can hook up to your TV, for free.
The speeds of CDRW refer to their ReWritable Speed, their Write(only) speed, and their Read speed. ReWritable (CD-RW) means you can use it again and again, whereas Write(only) (CD-R) is one shot. WHatever the speed, get one with 'Burnproof' technology or similar (there's several names for the same thing), as it will stop you wasting time burning a disc only to find the disk was spoilt.
A PC of the spec you're getting could handle most things; a second disk drive is good, for back-up, but 80GB is wonderfull, and you'd be hard pushed to find anything new much under 40GB HDD.
Englishman has found the secret of sanity with Window9x/ME; slap the OS in a small (max 2GB) partition or a seperate disk; if it gets cranky (and it does), you just reinstall the OS without effecting your data files. Reinstalling your current system would help; unless you're going to do video editing or CADCAM or major Photoshoping or lots of gaming, a PII is fine. However, computer prices are insanely low, and it's a good idea to buy now, as what you're talking about getting would still be pretty fresh in two-three years, which is the best you can expect really.
Macs are nice too, and very pretty; the new iMac is a sweetie!
People living in glass paradigms shouldn't throw stones...
