from 4GB of mem to 8GB

Hi to all c.o.l.h.'ers,

In late 2006 I bought a *cheap* desktop system that has worked
flawlessly, with 4 GB of RAM.

I put emphasis on the "cheap" side, because I want, once again,
to buy a cheap system...

But this time I want it to support 8 GB of RAM and I wanted
to know if anyone here could share the exact hardware setup
and software setup (distro / kernel) he has running a 'desktop'
Linux PC with 8 GB of memory.

Here's my current setup:

- Asus mb P5LD2 (allowing max 4 GB of mem)
- Core 2 Duo E6300
- 4 GB of Kingston 533 memory

I've used that system basically daily for 18 months and I think
I rebooted it maybe 4 times or so (current uptime being only
3 months, for I moved it to another room).

It's really more a 'workstation' than a desktop (for example
I never bothered to configure the sound on it: it's really
a machine I use just for work).

This setup as been rock-stable-solid (that is I never had any
problem other than occasionnally "kill -9'ing" Firefox-the-pig
after I let it running for weeks, with tens of tabs).

It has been running on Debian etch with a custom-build
32 bit non-PAE kernel:

Linux saturne 2.6.16.33 #1 SMP ... i686 GNU/Linux

I also made a lots of test with Xen using hardware virtualization
and everything was working really well (now I only use Xen on my
SVN, Samba, NFS, Squid, etc. server which is a separate machine).

I'm not using Xen on this machine anymore, but I'm constantly
running Windows XP inside VMWare's free vmplayer (and I do
need to run Windows XP all the time).

I was thinking about the following setup:

- Asus mb P5B-VM SE (chipset G965) (73 Euros)
- Core 2 Duo E6320
- 8 GB of 667 Kingston memory (200 Euros)

Since 4 or 5 "generations" I've been using Asus mobo's, Intel CPUs
and Kingston memory and I've always been very happy with these
brands so I'd rather stick with that.

Is anyone running such a cheap 8 GB setup as a 'desktop' Linux ?

What are the gotcha's ? Should I go the 32 bit + PAE or the
64 bit route ?

Will VMWare's vmplayer run fine on a 64 bit Linux ?

I don't want to go the server/ECC route. I want something cheap
that will work as flawlessly as my previous 4 GB setup was.

I need a Core 2 Duo E6320 setup that supports 8 GB of non-ECC mem
and that supports hardware virtualization (just in case in want
to go back to Xen and/or KVM).

Any help, hints, tips, gotchas from anyone here currently running
a Core 2 Duo with 8 GB desktop/workstation Linux on cheap hardware
are very welcome,

Thanks and see you here,

Alex
.

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