Need New System Advice!

[alx]

That's kind of the same route I took ro re-aquaint myself with Amiga - got an A1200 030/50 ; hardly the fastest thing around but it works well, and manny people I know hardly believe it's an Amiga (newicons makes a big difference to how a WB looks :-) )

You could expand it enormously (put it in a tower, add PPC, RTG, soundcard, PCI) and it could possibly run OS4 then.  But I'd be very expensive and less reliable/fast than an A1.  I'd just expand it moderately to get used to the Amiga way, and if you like what you see consider an A1.

[alx]

The bog-standard CPU in the A1200 is a 68020E at 14Mhz.  You can put an accelerator into the trapdoor slot with a faster processor.  I happen to have a 68030 (030) at 50Mhz (actually, it might be 40Mhz).  Other, better CPUs include the 68040 and 68060.

[alx]

So... a 50hz amiga is fairly quick then?

50Mhz isn't bad for a "classic" Amiga - but AFAIK the 68040 and even more so the 68060 are far more "efficient" processors, and would thrash my  68030.  Note that Amigas also use PowerPC processors (the A1 only uses PPC), but older versions of the operating syetem (3.9 and below) run on the 68k processors.

If you look at the bottom of an A1200 there is a plate that comes off - the accelerator (if there is one) fits under there.  But the easiest way to check what spec is to download a benchmarking utility like Amiga Intuition Based Benchmarks (using this just now, I confirmed that my CPU is 40Mhz).  I seriously doubt that there will be any other expansions if there isn't even a HDD - and the seller would probably know about them.

[alx]

The A1200 uses a laptop-sized HDD - not the standard type.  I've heard of people who have managed to squeeze normal ones in, but there can be problems with airflow etc, and you'll need an IDE adaptor - there's a bit about it in this faq.

[alx]

This is what the link pointed to:

Many people would prefer to use a 3.5" instead of the smaller 2.5" drives as the former are much cheaper. This is possible, but you need a special cable to connect the drive to your IDE controller. Additionally you should put some isolating material between the drive and the main board. Some people report termic problems but I did not notice anything.

Some dealers offer a set which contains the cable, isolating material.

If you are going to install an IDE-harddisk, regardless if 2.5" or
3.5", you should always consider that the it may not work flawlessly, if the drive and ROM-version have not been tested and approved by Commodore. Regarding the A1200, one should also remember that this Amiga has not been designed to hold 3.5" harddisk drives. The 2.5" drives, which are mainly thought for portable computers, may have some advantages (for example in power consumption, heat emission or shock
resistance) that could pay off because of the small keyboard case of the A1200 and the limited power supply. With the larger 3.5" drives, ventilation inside the computer might also be disturbed. If it is necessary to remove some shielding inside the A1200 to make the drive fit inside, even radio interference may occur.

To sum it up: if 3.5" harddisk drives could really be used in the
A1200 without any problems, you could be sure Commodore themselves wouldn't have used the slightly more expensive 2.5" drives in the A1200-HD.

AmigaOS could only recognise 4GB drives, but there are now ways around this - for instance upgrading to OS 3.5 will give large-drive support.  If you want to go the 3.5" route, an adaptor like this could probably do it - but check with someone who knows more first :-)

[alx]

You could try doing what I did and put classified adverts on this site, AmiBench and any other sites you find.  I did that and in a week got an offer at £40 for an A1200 030/40 8Mb, multisync monitor, CD-ROM, 270Mb HDD, Mouse, loads of games, loads of apps, a massive back-catalog of Amiga Format, external disk drive...

...it was good value :-D