"1) certain discussions lately suggest that on AMD chips the difference between the 1024 L2 cache as opposed to 512 L2 cache is not trivial, but rather 'large', out of proportion large. Theoretically, does this seem possible?" it would depend on the chip. ive heard the exact opposite - actually. going so far as suggesting that the 256k L2 cache sempron was pretty much equal with the 512k amd64. in fact if anyone were in the market for a new machine right now i would recommend an amd sempron 3100 on a budget board - it would do perfectly well until the next gen dual core processors arrive and theyre dirt cheap right now. basically an athhlon64 processor with half the cache and 64 bit features disabled, and it performs equal in most apps/games with its big brother for half the price. dale - this is the keyboard i picked up (although for regular price, grr). as far as modern keyboards go its far less annoying than anything else i could find. i still miss my old IBM click keyboards - i actually have several of them but rio gets pissed at me if i use them. she says its like trying to sleep beside a machinegun nest. keys are nice and flat like a laaptop keyboard, and the stupid multimedia keys are unobtrusively hidden, which is the next best thing to not having them there at all. im getting used to it slowly... its requiring me to learn how to type with a bit more 'finesse' as opposed to brute force like on 20 year old keyboards :) longhorn has a 3d desktop? jesus, wtf? i always disable all thhe stupid graphical glorification on an OS to make it run even faster, the last thing i need is 24/7 direct3D or openGL processing sucking up my resources. the one thing ive read lately thats REALLY intrigued me, btw, is that people are working on alternate uses for video cards. ive always thought thhat it was a tragic waste that whenever you werent playing half-life2 or doom3, your uber video card just sat there dormant. these days the higher end ones are as powerful as some PCs, heh - with beefy GPUs, tonnes of RAM and insane floating point processing performance. its about time someone gave them a use during desktop work, as a co-processor for some tasks (and it will finally give PCI express a purpose beyond marketing hype). i look forward to seeing what comes of it. cheers, -gabriel