When I was in college, I worked at an IBM Product Center (showing my age). That was when PCs first came out...I remember we were selling the Holy Grail of Graphics at the time...a graphics card with 1 MB of memory and a monitor that had 256 colors and could do 640x480 (VGA) resolution. Monitor was only $7,000 and the card to run it was around $3,000. Since I was an IBM employee, I got a 50% discount on any product, so I got a $3,200 3 yr. loan and got an IBM PC XT - an 8086 running at a screaming 4.77 MHz, upgraded to 512KB (yes, as in 1/2 megabyte ) of RAM and an unheard of 10 MB hard drive. Could display 16 colors! I think I was the only student on the NTSU campus that had a PC with a hard drive. I still have that XT in a box somewhere...

I did my internship at Apple Computers and received a free Mac Plus (all-in-one cube thing with one color green screen & a floppy drive). Sold it for $1,000.

First PC I built was a 80286 with the spider memory chips (I hated bending those pins) and I've been a PC guy ever since. Main reason is kinda the same as why I have a Road Star...I like to mess with my stuff & get inside it and see what makes it work & fix it. That's much easier on a PC than a Mac.

Currently running an ASUS mobo, AMD X2 6400 @ 3.2 GHz, 8 GB RAM and an NVIDIA 8800 GTS (flashed the chip with 8800 GTX firmware and it runs perfectly at the higher speed). I was on Vista 64 Pro a very short time (HATE the UAC) and have been running the 64-bit Windows 7 beta, RC and now RTM Win 7 64 Ultimate. LOVE it. The unwritten rule of thumb with upgrading Windows versions is that for every new release you needed roughly twice the "horsepower" to run the newer version. This was true from Window 98 to Windows 2000 and then to Win XP, but they screwed up with Vista because it really took four times the muscle to run Vista over XP. Windows 7 takes twice what XP did, so it really is what Vista SHOULD have been.

My long winded 2¢ worth...

RK