@Remus- On the win7 home/professional question, home doesnt have "XP mode", which i want just in case I need it. Also, I remember being left out of a lot of run commands in home edition of xp which were in xp professional, that kinda stuff they seem to leave out of the official list of version comparisons.
On the video card issue - I was up til 3'ish last night agonizing over it til my friggen eyes started to bleed. I picked the Nvidia GTX 260 not only because my best cards have been Nvidia, but all the good reviews and "testimonial posts" of consumers on product sites and forums about GTX 260. It looks like a really good card.
Meanwhile, I'm seeing people bitching left and right about the absolute myriad of Radeons. Getting errors, noisy, running hot, not the card in the picture. Diamond one sucks but the Sapphire one's good, but the Sapphire's way more expensive so maybe the vision-tek one, but people are crying about errors on the vision-tek one, but not if you are using this particular setup, but then it's only available over there, and the 5### which is slightly better than the 5###… go to hell. Seriously.
……..it's 3am and the BFG GTX 260 overclocked out of the box is looking pretty damn good for my $228 out the door. I'm betting it'll run The Witcher, Dragon Age, Majesty2, and Dawn of War games just beautifully for me.
I got a deal on the Antec 650 watt w/ modular cables - it was only 99 bucks! So $108.00 out the door.
Which makes up for the shank I willingly took on the processor. $290 at big store that was sold out, so I stopped in to an obscure little shop of horrors I always grab weird adapters and stuff at - thought I'd be a nice guy and support their little place. $299.99 okay ten bucks more when it all shakes out, whatevs. Overcharged me like 5 bucks extra, so like 30.00 tax + the other 15.00 extra for being a nice guy. I bought a couple other things so I didnt notice, end of the day money starts to become a blur. Think I may go back there tomorrow and return the thing on principle.
Scored on the RAM pretty good - got 8gb of Kingston 1600 HyperX on sale for $238.00 out the door. Admitted to the resident RAM geek that I was pretty much lost in the conucopia of memory there (started getting Radeon 5### headache again), and he assured me with convincing and wordy personal testimonial that i was getting a good deal w/ this RAM. I subsequently read
this review where some overclocking geek is doing backflips in joy over the product, so i'm thinking I may have settled for a good one.