Mate, appreciate your thoughtful responses.

1. Roger wilco re an affordable AMD dual or quad core set up at some stage. Thing is, tho, my set up is an old socket config- socket 939. For which there are no newish rocket ship CPU's. It would seem the only true alternative is a heart transplant ie. a mobo/CPU/RAM combo into my existing case and exisiting cards/PSU/HDD's etc.( If $ were no issue, I'd go for it, but I'm having to be a bit judicious with discretionary outlays currently, as the said beloved Dad advanced me twenty large at no interest last April to soften the burden of a divorce settlement, and I want to maintain the momemtum of repaying him back.)

2. Speaking of Dads and the video project. I got this idea into my head a few years back about capturing some footage of Mum and Dad talking about their lives, family and social history, and life lessons learnt. The thought was to use modern tech means get an affordable permanent record of them as a person, for present and future generations of the family. Particularly the little nippers and juvies. My only Grandpa died when I was 8 and I feel the loss of never really knowing him to this day. I started with my 85 y.o. Mum about 3 years ago. Unfortunately, just a month after the 40 min. pilot session with a borrowed little digicam, which was only ever intended to get lighting and sound levels right and personally get a rough idea of how to interview and steer the discussion, she passed away, basically of old age plus a nasty blood clot. So this oral history thing has been on my mind for a while but has taken a bit of time to get my own camera and get into it.

As a point of interest, it's been suprising how different video players impose differing loads on the CPU, at least here on mine. Worst of all is Apple Quicktime, WMP (11 here) is better, but an open source player called VLC is best of all. For a given clip which makes Quicktime load the CPU to 100% and produces a stuttering
replay, WMP 11 loads the CPU to about 90%, and VLC loads to ~60%. Interesting, and I wonder if there are implications for sound reproduction of, say , mp3's thru QT or WMP. Any thoughts?

Cheers,

John