Pros: Great to have a drop-in SSD replacement for PATA laptop hard drives. Fast. Much less time waiting for disk I/O.

Cons: Only 8GB of space, and expensive for that.

Overall Review: Installed in an old Pentium III-M Thinkpad. It now boots Windows XP to the desktop in 7-8 seconds. I used nLite to optimize the XP install and I would recommend this if using XP.

Pros: This monitor is fast, bright and high contrast. It's great for movies and games. It's huge and looks great even from a distance. No dead pixels. Nice looking casing and stand.

Cons: The panel is a TN type panel. It's extremely sensitive to vertical viewing angle. Due to its size and typical viewing position, there is a very noticeable variation in color from the top to the bottom of the screen during normal use with static input like a web browser or a graphic editor. This monitor is not good for photo work and other activities where a uniform display is important. The stand is very short. Not having a height adjustment wouldn't be a problem if it was just one inch taller. The settings buttons are on the right side aligned vertically. It's nearly impossible to read the embossed labels on these buttons, and with a second monitor right next to this one, the buttons are inaccessible.

Overall Review: Returned one that arrived with a broken VESA mount. Half of it was clanging around inside the monitor. The stand is easy to connect to the monitor if you follow the directions. I have done it twice now and if not for the reviews on this site I wouldn't have even thought about it. The process is unusual because the material accepting the stand is a flexible rubbery material, but it's logical and easy to do.

Pros: Very fast and quiet compared to my previous Seagate hard drive.

Cons: It lasted only 8 hours of power on time before failing. This was just long enough for me to install an OS, apps and get settled on it. I consider myself lucky in that it failed early enough that I did not have time to accumulate/lose much data on it.

Overall Review: Searching for a solution revealed that this series of drives has a high failure rate. There are many good reviews of the drive and it may be up for a product award, which it probably deserves when it is reliable. However chances of getting a reliable part may be less with this drive. Research first so that you are not surprised.

Pros: DX10, dual DVI, great performance as a general 2D card.

Cons: My previous video card was a 6800GT AGP. FPS benchmarks online show the 8600GT beating or matching the old 6800GT in most games however this may not tell the whole story. The problem is that the framerate fluctuates drastically with the 8600GT and the dips in framerate are extremely distracting. I don't play games much anymore, but be sure to keep this in mind if you plan to use it for games, especially those that use OpenGL.

Overall Review: At 100% speed the fan is loud, but when controlled automatically it is always at lower speeds and nearly inaudible.

Pros: Supports 1333 FSB, plenty of USB ports. Everything worked initially in Vista (including sound, ethernet, IDE DVD-RW), only needed to install ICH9 drivers (downloaded, not from CD). Bad capacitors on an ASUS board were the reason for needing new hardware, so I tolerated a lack of Firewire ports for a lower priced P35 board with solid capacitors. So far it has been great.

Cons: No Firewire ports. Some settings in the BIOS are not documented well and it is not clear what parameters they change including Performance Enhance and Robust Graphics Booster. The software/driver packages and installations on the CD do not go well in Vista, but you should skip the CD anyway and get the latest drivers from the internet.

Pros: Fast, stable. 4MB L2 cache and 1333mhz FSB made this a good deal to me. I've had decent luck with the stock HSF, 25C idle/40C load. I didn't have to replace the thermal interface compound. The stock fan is quiet.

Cons: When installing the retaining mechanism for the stock HSF the click-through attachment did not seem sturdy. It was hard to tell if it was fully secured without removing the motherboard and checking the back.

Overall Review: This was my first build in over two years coming from a Socket 939 AMD machine, so the newer fan controls made it seem the fan was not working on initial power on although it was fine and began spinning once the temperature increased. If you are expecting the fan to spin up to a high speed right at power on, keep this in mind.