I guess I'm just old-fashioned here . . . I only have one CDROM driver and no DVD drive on this machine. Other than that, the Dell 8200 with 768 MB seems to be reasonable. The only thing I can help with is the News Reader. Pan (http://pan.rebelbase.com/) seems to work great under both gnome and KDE. The rpm is available as pan.i386 1:0.14.2-7 and seems to be a part of ISO 3 from the original download. HTH /mde/ just my two cents . . . .