[Nottingham] Buying advice sought

[Graham Dicker]

I want to buy a new desktop PC and would like some advice on how to go about 
it please.

The machine will be used at home as a general purpose computer but also as a 
Digital Audio Workstation (at a amateur level).

I boot into Linux 99% of the time but there are occasions when I need to use 
Windows for example updating my satnav so I need to boot off of two separate 
hard drives (as I do at the moment).

My current machine is a Pentium 4 3.20 GHz with XP on one drive and OpenSuse 
12.2 on the other. A local PC repair shop built it for me about 3 years ago 
for £250 and the only problem till now has been with the case, which is badly 
designed and cramped so I have to e.g. remove the memory in order to fir a new 
hard drive.
I use Ardour for recording and it works reasonably well although in order to 
achieve low latency I have to do things like disable my wireless network card, 
and shutdown a few other non-essential processes. It would be nice if I didn't 
have to do that with a new machine.

So, I am thinking: PCWorld? Dell? Build it myself? Is everything 64 bit 
nowadays?

Thanks

Graham Dicker