Finally got around to making the switch and getting my old stalwart box out of day to day life and swapping the new one which should last me for a good few years to come. It's been a while coming this. Almost ten months after starting to scope out components for a box, the blessed discovery of Custom PC magazine for advice, blowing up a motherboard in five seconds flat and a fair old amount of dithering because XP SP2 really doesn't like Norton Internet Security (the secret, I realise now, is to set windows to ignore the DEP feature SP2 gives 64bit machines as an option. Set the boot parameters from \noexecute=optin to \execute and all should be well), it's up and running with lots of familiar software and some new stuff I've installed because building a new box is a bit like a spring clean. It looks like this. Runs AMD64 3500, 2GB RAM, 160GB RAID-1 SATA 7200rpm hard drives, DVD+-RW burner, and yes, a floppy drive. There are lots of suggestions in this post for utilities, but here are the few I installed besides the usual suspect apps like Office and VS. First, some online security

• Agnitum Outpost Firewall
• Avast Antivirus
• Microsoft Spyware Checker Beta

Then, the web and bloggy stuff

• Firefox
• FileZilla
• RSSBandit
• W.bloggar
• Delicious extensions for Firefox and IE

And finally the misc bits and pieces

• fxCop for .NET 1.1
• powertoys for winxp
• uxthemepatcher

and yes, MS Plus and the Winter 2004 Fun Pack for soem colour and fun. Now if I can finally manage to rip all my CDs and get Win2003 running in VPC, I might be getting somewhere.