Very impressive Brings back memories. Except mine did not involve a woman putting together my computer parts with latex (edit: cotton) gloves on.

There WAS a woman involved. But more of a "oh hes doing that thing he does" rather than "our acrylic computer parts, let me put them together with you".

I would guesstimate about 7 - 10k in parts there, give or take the things I can't see (speed of memory, CPUs, etc). Seems like you went for a good middle ground between performance and cost. Which is probably the best place to be unless you want to go crazy. Call me practical but I see no need to do that for a non main computer box though.

Stick those monitors closer together

And why Vista? *cringe*