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I take it you didn't go with the Cameron/Weaver service plan (Onsite Service Bundle with Facehugger, Chestburster, and HumanAutopsy). :)

There are 1 GB USB 2.0 keychain flash drives. That amount of flash would have been plenty for a MacOS 8/9 System folder, or for a Windows 98SE installation. You can get a high-speed 4 GB CompactFlash card for about $450 from online photo stores. Put one into a USB 2.0 or FireWire reader...

It's not clear from the article whether this is 'merely' a ton of RAM, or is the whole enterprise-computing IBM-style deal complete with uninterruptible power supplies and hard disks for backup. But hey, if you're an "unnamed" Government department that can throw around this kind of change...

For PhotoShop, the dual CPUs may do you good -- not so much for launch time, but for performance once PhotoShop is up. For your other apps, what you have now is not broken (sorry!) If you can fit your most commonly used apps into 1 GB or 2 GB of "disk" space, 4 GB of RAM and a RAMdisk utility...

Forgot one: 5. Keep programs open. When you close the last document, just minimize the application, instead of closing it completely. This makes accessing the application again a lot faster.

A dual processor system can be advantageous for multi-tasking ... say, doing DV (camcorder) => MPEG-2 (DVD-Video) encoding on one processor, while leaving the other one available other applications. Startup is pretty much serial; it depends partly on raw hard disk speed; partly on how much...

Ron, I'm not sure why a program with a name like "Window Blinds" would require a really fast CPU. For a PC, I think of compute-intensive applications as being 3D games, MP3 encoding, MPEG-2 encoding, PhotoShop work, and the like. For virus and spyware sweepers, the best solution is to run...

It might be. You might be able to get a single-CPU system similar to one of today's dual-CPU ones; or a dual-CPU system equivalent to a quad-CPU one. Since CPU performance is your key metric, that's nothing to sneeze at.

Just for kicks, I went to Dell's small business section and configured a Dell Precision Workstation 670. Two Intel Xeon 3.60 GHz CPUs (2 MB L2 Cache each), 1 GB ECC SDRAM, 400 GB SATA HD, 16x DVD-ROM, 16x DVD burner, 128 MB graphics, Windows XP Pro, Office Pro, and sound card (Audigy 2). But...

Unless you're running applications that take a number of minutes or hours to complete a task, I'm not sure if you will notice the difference between a 3.6 GHz CPU and the 3.0 GHz CPU you have now. Rule of thumb: in the absence of such a workload, there needs to be a 50%+ speedup for most people...

1. Part of its reliability is due to the fact that Apple doesn't support every combination of junk-quality parts that someone might throw together. 2. Part of what makes Macintoshes appealing is that Apple is willing and able to design systems that are more than the sum of their hardware and...