OS and Hardware recomendation

[plasticmoulderman]

I'm about to replace my 10 year old HS machine (Dell Optiplex GX240) with a new one.

I wan't something that is durable, silent and does not produce to much heat. I'm considering AsRock Nettop Core 100HT Core i3-330m.

Is there anyone who's using this hardware or similar as a HS server?

Also, should i go for Windows 7 32-bit or 64-bit? I know that some hardware may not have drivers for 64-bit, but is there any benefit running 64-bit OS when using the machine as a HS server?

My current system,

AMD Phenom II X6 1055T Thuban 6 Core Processor 2.8GHZ, 16 Gigabyte DDR3 Ram, 2 Velociraptor 150 gigabyte 10,000 rpm drives in Raid 1, Gigabit Nic's

Currently experimenting with VMware server on a server 2008 host operating system. I run HSPro on a win XP Pro guest in VMware along with two other guests. One more XP Pro guest for all my weather station software and databases and a FreeNAS guest for system backups.

The whole point of going full out with this setup was to try and retire the four seperate systems and combine them into one box to save on power and headaches. My current killowatt reading averages around 60-80 watts of power usage so not too bad for all it's doing.

So far the only guest still with hiccups is the one with HSPro and this is most likely caused by the server 2008 host. TTS doesn't seem to work with the server 2008 host but this isn't a big deal since I currently don't utilize whole house audio anyways.