Well, good news on the time trials. For the work our code needs to do (word search in large bodies of text using Perl), it look less than 1/2 the time it did before! Amazing. Only if I had the money for Opteron or an FX chip. :) Everything seems to be working great so far as well. Go 64-bit.
That's a surprisingly large improvement. Good news for you! I built my dual Opteron system for less than $2,200 (no monitor). There's a big jump from the 242 to the 244 (double the cost) and the 246 is way up there. IIRC the Opteron and the FX are essentially the same chip and are priced about the same. Once you go 64 you'll never go back ;-) The fact that SuSE beats Windows to 64bit by over a year (based on MS projections) makes it all the sweeter. Jeff