Ok, here we go again. I have a question to ask you before my wife buys me a new system. She told me that she would get me a new AMD 64 X 2 dual core, and that I can get it in any configuration I want. Of course, I want the media center edition with the radio/tv tuner card, the a/v in and out, and the big drive and boat-loads of memory, but I need to ask you about this:

Ok, when I go into any store, this has happened two times in the last couple or three weeks. When I put the disk into the drive on one of the display models and start it back up, right there, in front of everyone in the store, and I am supposed to know what to do with a computer, the swspeak fails. Here's what happens, to the best of my understanding.

First of all, my wife along with the store employee are watching to see if the thing will work. Neither of them knows jack swish about a talking computer. Well, everything, as far as the hardware is detected, and it tells me to just run swspeak when the boot sequence is finished, though I never hear this. Well, I just run swspeak when everything is finished. I get a message about having "failed to write 128 samples." Does this have to do with the kind of on-board sound hardware on the machine, or not?:"Should I have this disabled in the bios when I buy the machine, and just put my soundblaster live ls in it or what? Should I run a sound configuration program in GRML to detect this new sound hardware? I just want to know.

I hope that there is nothing totally fatal in the system that makes GRML not boot on one of these machines. I really like GRML and plan to use it. Should I not get a system like this, or is there sopme simple fix?

Thank you very much.