Wow, what have you been using instead?  Subdivide?

@mauidude
I see you posted in the wings3d forum too, you can do it with primitives or as pakled suggests with both programs.  Wings is a very strong program, it's very good at what it does and it's pretty intuitive.  Blender does a lot of other stuff too, but it takes longer to learn.  It also allows things like meshes with holes and lets you have subsurf while modeling on a simple mesh, both of which can simplify modeling quite a lot.