Hey Avi,

Have you had any trouble running games on 7 RC? I haven't been able to get a number of Steam games to run, and since I can't find the game exes, I can't set them for Vista or XP compatibility. Just wondering if you had any thoughts on that. The culprits at the moment seem to be UT3 and World of Goo, but I haven't tried everything yet.

Well hurry up and try everything.

Uh, right, that'll be no problem with a 2 year old and a newborn...

And me..... somewhere in-between.

I'd be happy to help anyone one-on-one who is considering building their own PC. Generic notes don't help too much, because I do take into account what the person wants to do with the machine and their budget.

Something to keep in mind before asking my advice: "cheap" computers for me start at $1500, I can't seem to put together a machine for less than that. So if you want something to just surf the web you're probably better off going with a pre-built from one of the major manufacturers.

I know what you mean. I've always hated choosing middle-of-the-road components. It just feels like if I'm going to buy something, I should buy something I won't regret.

I priced out building a cheap computer before buying off the shelf. At the bottom end, there is no point.

The heavy markups are clearly on the new toys. Dell's markup for the i7 products was insane, and HP was no better. What was really odd was that some of the Del setups seemed wrong. Chris can correct me, but I think the new i7 chip-set uses 3 memory channels, so you need multiples of 3 for RAM - i.e., I have 3 rows of 4. But when I tried to order the dell, it only offered multiples of two, and capped at 8. Perhaps I don't understand, but I don't think that is a good use of the chip-set. And for that inefficient design, you pay an extra $2,000. Wow, $2,000 and a guy to read the instruction manual to me in Hindi after 2 hours on hold when I have a problem, sign me up!

I'm curious, but honestly I'm not gaming on this thing, and I'm still concerned about the CAD software having a fit. As Chris can attest, I spend many hours trying to weed through the fact, BS, and serious issues that CAD has with some software, hardware, and/or vendors. Until I know Win 7-64 bit works with those programs, I'll stay put. But let me know, I'm curious.

Actually, as I understand it, as long as you have a minimum of 3 dimms, you're using 3 channel. I'm not sure how Intel's doing it, but there we are.