lies its all lies.

I've never used this utility. Does it work very well? Is there a better option for Vista?

I think you're being tongue-in-cheek, but I'll take it on face value... Brandon's saying the Vista transfer utility is worthless. I suspect it works about as well as the WinXP "System Restore" utility, which is to say, sometimes and/or mostly. My personal recommendation would be Symantec Ghost (or even Norton Ghost, if you don't have access to the enterprise version).

Or, hey, don't you already have Acronis True Image? I thought I saw that as a bundled special in one of your Newegg parts lists.

I'm not interested in copying everything exactly, but using a program that provides options for which programs/data to transfer. IBM/Lenovo laptops have such a utility, for instance, which works surprisingly well.

Unfortunately, I don't have Acronis True Image due to reshuffling of combo items on my Newegg order for best savings. Acronis got left out of the mix. But hey, that Samsung DVD drive is very nice and I wouldn't mind having a 2nd one (Acronis was thrown in free as an optional combo).

I dunno, maybe I'll just do manual reinstalls/moves of stuff I need. A lot of things I had on my W2K machine will be unnecessary or not optimal for Vista. A couple of programs I use a lot are PowerDVD 5 and CorelDraw/CorelPaint Essentials version 9. Probably Windows Media Center will work better as a DVD Player and I should really just install the Corel package with the CD-ROM.

Yep, sounds good. PowerDVD is usually bundleware.

OK, after a little research, I think this is the way to go. One large formatted drive. My primary drive still has 45 GB of space free; plenty of room for programs there. I'll install large programs on the 1 TB drive, such as Google Earth and flight sims. I've also historically kept my email databases on my data drive/partition.

Related to the PC build:
Man, the Antec 300 case is handsome! I'll post some pictures of the inside and outside sometime soon. I've still got to do some cable management inside. Next on my shopping list is a modern (internal or external) TV tuner card for my analog cable and terrestrial hi def signals.

Soooo... I have now connected my 1TB drive and decided on two properties: MBR file system (not GPT) and just one large partition.

I was able to connect my old hard drive to my new computer via the eSATA (power and data) connectors on my case. I actually left the hard drive mounted in the old computer. As usual, I got those "access denied" errors when trying to read the three partitions on that drive, so I had to make some security permission changes. I'm not sure, but this might mess up the readability of the drive for the other computer(!).

Also now I made a minor overclock to 3.0GHz on the CPU. Fine so far, with system temp at 98 Fahrenheit and CPU at 78 Fahrenheit with my massive cooler!

This brings my Windows Experience rating to 5.9, the highest possible rating!

That's really nice. What's it do under full load for a while?

Good question; I should install and run World Community Grid, possibly, or install the game that came with my video card and try that. Or, I suppose I can find a stress tester somewhere. Another thing: my case has optional fan openings on the front that are not yet fitted with fans. I could install one or two 120mm fans.

OH!, BTW, it turned out that all the permission manipulations on my old hard drive seemingly did not adversely affect the old system! So for now my wife has a working computer of her own to use until I get to a repair attempt on her laptop. For expediency and backup, and since I have such a huge amount of storage now, I copied a ton of junk from the old computer. I'll sort it out over time and discard what I don't need.

OK, I've installed the BOINC client for WCG and set it to run my CPU at maximum use of 100%. The highest temp I've seen after a few minutes of observation is 32.5 Celcius or 90.5 Fahrenheit. Today though I have the room air conditioner running as well.