Be wary of DHL. They delivered our laptops on Friday - while my parents were out of town - to my parents' front porch. Says signature required. No one was there to sign for it. Sat there until they got home on Monday. Fortunately, they weren't stolen. But there are no "P Anderson"s in their neighborhood. And the "signature" is just a slightly wavy line - not even a regular messy signature like mine, but just a line with maybe a bump in it. But DHL can say someone signed for it and it's not their fault - even if it was just the driver who didn't want to lug it back to the truck and come back again.

I've already called DHL and told them to hold it until I can pick it up on Saturday.

I have everything shipped to my office so I no longer worry. Congrats on all the new toys! :D

glad you have not had any issues with vista. My only workings have been already trouble machines. The owners may have futzed them up already.

Is it going to be hot swappable?

I am going to expand my external firewire/ USB 2.0 backup setup to include a RAID 5 that I can get via the wireless n network or via the gigabit wired network in the apartment. My media library is getting a little big.

Vista has been really good here in the Nuclear Muffin Test Kitchen - but our slower old boxes run Ubuntu.

I'll be interested to see how your RAID works out. I've been drooling over the geeky alternative: drobo, but it seems like RAID-5 still makes more sense.

Intriguing. Interesting concept. Gizmodo recommends waiting for the next generation (stability issues, price, and some other minor quibbles), but it's definitely a clever solution.

I do the same.
Ditto (I hate posting that, but I'm doing it anyways).
__________________________________

At work, we have set ourselves up with Mozy Pro as our off site backup. This is in addition to our on-site backup. I gotta say that it works very well with the only "interruption" being a small pop-up window (like the one I get whenever an email comes in) saying that it is starting the daily incremental backup. No hit at all to performance. Pretty reasonable at $3.95 per seat plus $0.50 per GB per month.

They also have a free consumer version. Backup up to 2 GB for free!

FWIW, Mirra sucks.

I tried that once. I should have known better knowing our s/r department. The good news was that I got word that it was there faster than any time out (because they couldn't figure out why it didn't seem to have an order # associated with it), but I could tell from the tone of their voice when the called to ask me about it that I very quickly needed to pull out a cover story (I went with, "Damnit, I told them not to ship it to this address, sorry about that."). We get tons (literally and figuratively) of equipment delivered daily, it occurred to me right then that I shouldn't burden them like that, both out of courtesy to them and out of concern for my purchases.