Do I upgrade from 5.x to anything ?

[bsdfsse]

Hi,

I have been running 4.10-Stable for about 3 weeks, and one of my 
computers doesn't work with it.  Apparently FreeBSD 4.x doesn't like the 
  Asus motherboard's HD controller, and I constantly get disk errors. 
HOWEVER, 5.x seems to work fine.

For the last few weeks, I've been going through this ritual of 
installing 4.10-Release, then immediately upgrading to 4-Stable - using 
the instructions in a book I bought ("Absolute BSD").

My big machine has an Asus motherboard, 160GB, and 2 x 200GB Maxtor 
drives.  It also has a new 400w power supply, and a Celeron chip.  I 
basically replaced every part of the machine trying to get to 4.x to 
work, then gave up and am trying to run 5.x.

Is there something I should be doing after I install 5.x-Release to get 
the latest software?  On 4.x I would install "cvsup" and 
"cvsup-without-gui", then running "cvs -g -L 2 stable-supfile", and 
finally doing a make buildworld, etc, etc.  I have no idea what my 
options are on 5.x

I heard 5.x-Stable is coming out in October, so does that mean you can't 
really update 5.x until October?  I installed the 5.3-Beta CD, but the 
stable-supfile looks like it will try to get the 4.x stable code.  I 
also did not really want to run "current" since this machine is supposed 
to be my home server.

I mostly want my ports up to date, so I can run Thunderbird, Firefox, 
etc (if they are available on 5.x).

Maybe I should make my working 4.x box my "server", and make my 
nonworking machine a 5.x "desktop".

My original plan was to run 4.x on all my home boxen, then load 5.x when 
it got to around 5.3.1 - except now my big box wont run 4.x.  So I am 
forced to load 5.x now, or just let the machine sit for a month.

Another option is to try and use the help on the mail lists to figure 
out why 4.x wont run on my big box.  I tried so many things I don't 
really want to think about it anymore, lol.  The Asus motherboard is a 
replacement for another one that died while initially trying to install 
4.x I literally replaced everything inside the case: power supply, 
motherboard, chip, drive controller, RAM, HD's, cables, CDR's, cables. 
The current error is the hardware error "Signal 11".  %-(

Well back to my original question:  Any suggestions on how to get the 
currently available 5.x tree modestly up-to-date?  Or should I wait 
until it matures more?

thx!