Ok, in light of the awesome advice offered by you members, here is my new Vista PC, and the last major upgrade I will get to do for the forseeable future with the baby comin', so I made it a doozy

Intel Core 2 Duo Processor E6400 (2.13GHz,1066FSB) with 2MB cache
2GB DDR2 SDRAM at 667MHz
NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GTS (640 MB GDDR 3)
250GB SATA II Hard Drive (7200RPM)
13 in 1 Media Card Reader
Microsoft Windows Vista Home Premium Edition, English
16X DVD+R/RW CD-RW Combination Drive

This is an Dell XPS system (Which means a much more advanced motherboard with SLI capabilities, Physics accelerator, etc) from Dell, and for those who don't already know, I have used them quite happily for my last 3 systems. My only complaint is the minimum power supplies they use, which I promptly switch out. Still Dell has a solid product for gamers now, with awesome support standard!

After I sell my old OLD PC (Still using the Radeon 9700 pro and rockin') for about $400 to the sister-in-law, this baby will run me a tad over $500.

Not too shabby a system there, Sir Dragon

Aye, very nice, good fun with that

indeed, very nice system there always nice to get a new beast while you can

Guess buying premium has it's benifits, listen to this.

You may have all seen my latest PC problems, I in fact lost my entire C drive which included my contacts and outlook messages (mostly).

Dell went around the mulberry bush 4-5 times, replacing drives, motherboards, and cables, but they could not figure out the problem.

I gave them a week after this failed troubleshooting, and began looking at it myself. It turned out my CPU is going bad. Replaced tha with a spare and BOOM, system 100%. I was slightly pissed at the XPS technicial team, I had formatted a drive I didn;t need to, wasted time from work to meet a tech at my house, and spent hours on the phone with techs.

I ordered that new Dual Core I was talking about in another post, and said to myself, screw Dell support. Rashness got the better of me this afternoon and I called XPS support to speak to a supervisor. I have him my horror story, and he then assured me I would be taken care of and transfered me to customer service for XPS.

Long story short, Dell is sending me an updated and better XPS model to exchange out my old system. Talk about incredible service! I will have some specs later.

Damn And nice Hope that runs well for ya too, guess sometimes it pays to gripe

You are damn one hell of a lucky dragon thats forsure!

So did you end up with an extra CPU or were you able to return it? Glad to hear that Dell backs it's product, my current laptop is a Dell.

Tex

This is still an on-going saga. I am growing less impressed with Dell support as each day of my warranty passes. Been down for over 3 weeks total now.

They sure went out of their way to make me feel like a valued customer initially, now I have to follow-up on a daily basis to make ANY forward movement. Maybe it's the holiday rush, but after having to mess with this for so long I am near wits end.

If this keeps up, I may check into registering DellSucks.com jeesh

Bummer.. sorry to here about your computer woa's.. that sucks..