Well, I put together my new PC this weekend. After about 5 or 6 years of incremental upgrades, I finally decided to invest in a completely new system. And it was quite a transition... My old computer still used PATA hard-drives, first-generation DDR RAM, and even the AGP bus. Not to mention the processor, which was an AthlonXP running at about 2Ghz. I didn't go nuts, but I wanted to get a platform that would hold up for the next few years. I had a bit of a scare at first. I spent 2 hours (give or take) getting everything installed, only to have the power switch just click at me. I would have been worried if I didn't know from experience that no one has ever hooked up the case control leads correctly on the first try. I can almost imagine the relieved looks on the Penn scientists faces when one of their colleagues flipped a pair of vacuum tubes and ENIAC roared to life. In my case, the motherboard pins were color-coded, but that coding didn't match the system that the case manufacturer used... I haven't done much with it so far, other than mess around with Vista. I picked up an OEM copy of Vista Ultimate from Newegg.com. I haven't actually tried out any of the Ultimate-exclusive features, but I have to say that I'm really impressed with Vista so far. The live Search function built into the Start button (or whatever they're calling it now) is very smooth. My only complaint is that if you want to use the slimmer "Clas.sic" menu system, you won't be able to also take advantage of the new Search. From a purely aesthetic perspective, Aero is amazing. The translucent windows are actually a lot more impressive than I was expecting, and I've stopped using maximized windows for no good reason other than they look really nice. Frankly, other windowing systems just look ugly in comparison now. The 3D Alt-Tab replacement for switching between open windows is nice, but probably not as useful as Exposé. I'm also really glad that Microsoft has finally added the desktop to the possible Alt-Tab destinations. The User Account Control functionality that Apple has so excellently lampooned recently isn't anywhere near as intrusive as they would like you to believe. I suppose that depends on whether or not you actually like being told when your computer is doing something. Personally, I do. And that concept also happens to be one of the simpler tenets of human-computer interaction - tell the user what you're doing. The only other thing that I've done so far is to fire up Half-Life 2 - The Lost Coast. It was as smooth as glass, running at about an average of 75fps at 1280x1024 with HDR enabled, 4x anti-aliasing, and 16x anisotropic filtering for textures. My motherboard and video card came with copies of Supreme Commander and Dark Messiah of Might & Magic, but I haven't installed either yet. I was busy giving Zeus the business in God of War II. I'm actually almost a quarter of the way through for the second time. I usually don't fall for the alternate costume nonsense that a lot of action-adventure games use as replay bait, but it's probably going to work on me in this case. The Cod of War costume is great. :lol: