well, the shuttle died, for good; after serving me for a mere 3 years. and there's little to be salvaged from the spoils, apart from the hard drives and dvd drive. and replacing just the mainboard and casing won't be cost-effective or add to any future-readiness. so there goes a month and a half of my salary allowance into my new rig. hit the more info link on the right for more details. for some reason, vista embraced the new hardware whereas xp decided to bluescreen and crash, so i had to reinstall it. but yeah, everythings fine and well now. my vista experience index upped to 5.5 from 4.3 (: lets hope this rig has a longer life expectancy.