Struggles with new computer

Recently I bought all the bits and pieces to build a new PC for home. My old one is a few years old now, and isn’t up for all the video transcoding I throw at it these days (mainly converting Xvid and Divx TV shows into MP4 for use on Xbox). I’m not a real hardware guru, but every few years I read enough to know what the state of the art is and roll up my sleeves for a few weeks. This time I had one small snafu which was that nothing powered on after I put it together. It turned out that the problem was the CPU was not completely seated. I had to twist it off of its heatsink, straighten a bent pin, and re-seat it. Wow, it worked!

So far I’ve installed Vista, and a few basic apps. Next I need to move all my hard drives over, but since for some reason I installed my biggest drive as Raid 0 (with just itself in the array), I have to move the files off and reformat it on the new system. To help with that, I purchased an external USB hard drive that will also help me store completed iMovie projects so that I an keep one Greer movie at a time on my Powerbook.