All my imagery is stills, and most of that is still done on my PC. I think I'll go for the 2.53GHz processor with the lesser video. I got no 3D going on.

Thanks for the input.

Is there a way to import messages from Outlook to Outlook Express? I am trying to save e-mails from work that are not entirely business-related in my personal e-mail at home. But I don't know if OE will recognize the files. I would be using Outlook at home, but when I tried to import my old OE files into Outlook, it changed all the "received" dates to the date of import (maybe it just did that for the sent mail, but it was still annoying).

PC, there's a program that will import from just about any email program and export into any email program. It's what saved me when I changed from Windows Mail to Outlook. It's intended as an archive program, but I used itfor the import/export. I'm pretty sure it was MailStore, which is here: [link]

From The Consumerist: Best Buy Optimization Is A Big Stupid Annoying Waste Of Money

Over the past year, a number of you have been telling us that, due to "pre-optimization" of computers, it's difficult -- sometimes impossible -- to walk into a Best Buy and leave with the advertised deal (in effect, you would be paying a $39.99 surcharge over the computer's advertised price). We decided to look into your complaints. We sent the Consumer Reports secret shoppers to 18 different Best Buys in 11 states, and one of our shoppers was denied the price advertised for a specific model because only pre-optimized computers were available. When the Consumer Reports engineers compared three "optimized" computers to ones with default factory settings, there was no performance improvement. In one case, an optimized laptop actually performed 32% worse than the factory model.

Thanks, Deena! I'll look into that. Unfortunately, as I suspected, I can't install it on my work computer, so the export remains a bit of a problem, especially since the ability to create new archives or add to existing archives has been disabled.

What's a good program for running multiple IM accounts on a PC?

I use Pidgin: [link]

one of our shoppers was denied the price advertised for a specific model because only pre-optimized computers were available

Bingo! Happened to us with every model we decided we wanted. Bastards.

Was that you you mentioned this before? The article rang a bell for me....

Anyway, hopefully all the bad publicity will learn them a lesson.

Yeah, that was me and my sister getting hosed because I wasn't feeling up to the drive to Fry's. Never again. They have about 5 categories of poorly explained "optimisations" and just about everything we even looked at was bumped up in price by it. And when removing manufacturer crap leaves you with Best Buy icons on your desktop, they're not even pretending well.

I'm sorta' amazed that a major retailer engaged in such a scam. (I mean, a scam this easy to expose.) Are they hurting financially, and this is a desperate strategy on their part to survive? Or was some corporate guy gonna lose his bonus if he didn't get sales back up?