Update

Hey.. been quiet lately and I'll tell you why. I've been spending most of my time (other than work) building my new pc and moving my software and files over to it from the mac.

A couple of things to know on the software side: 1) Quicken for mac does not move over to the PC very easily and even then it requires a ton of work. Not cool. 2) email from apple mail to outlook or outlook express, forgetaboutit. 3) iCal and address book over to outlook. not sure yet, still trying to get that one to work.

So essentially, moving my important data back to the pc is not going well. Fortunately I have all my old files from when I moved to the mac in the first place so I've moved back to them and given up on the 3 months of data from my mac days. Quicken is easy to update since I have all the statements, email is another story though I only will loose a tiny bit since I've been keeping stuff on my pop servers for the past 2 months in preperation.

Hardware: so far, I love my new pc. I bought a new case for my old mb and a new power supply and vid card as well. The case is the new Antec P180 which was engineered with 3 qualities in mind: silence (evidenced by its huge 120mm 3 speed fans and rubber hd mounts and) and cooling (again see the fans, wind tunnels and vid card cooling baffles) and ease of installation (very nice sliding HD mounts and other cool features). The case rocks.

I tried to buy the new Antec Phantom 500 Power supply, but its too new and I can't find it in stock anywhere. I settled (and glad I did) on the ePower Lion EP-450P5-L1 which so far has prooved amazingly silent. It has passive cooling and also a fan that will kick in variably whenver the load gets up over 300W. So far I've never heard it.

Video card was a Gigabyte GeForce 6600 GT card. The 6600 is just about as good as the 6800 but 1/2 the price. A great deal and it runs my games quite well. I sold my $500 top of the line ATI card when I bought the mac and in general I tend to like nVidia stuff better so I'm happy there.

Oh I forgot to mention my favorite new part. I was going for a quiet pc (and I so far succeeded since I can't hear a thing from this box) so I wanted to replace the intel fan on the CPU since it is massivly loud. I ended up buying the biggest most insane fan/heat sink unit from zalman. It's a CNPS7700-ALCU and you can see a photo here. It is amazing. The fan barly spins and the CPU has so far kept quite cool. It's the best $40 I've ever spent on a pc build.

Ok, back to organizing my email.. Talk to you soon.