8 will still feature full mouse support. touch is simply an option in the control panel.
if you buy 7 now, you can upgrade to 8 later for $14. but 7 is still like 200 bucks. might as well just wait and get 8. Since it's an extension of 7 more than anything, I think it will be pretty stable in desktop mode.
A high end gaming rig from 2006 is like an off the shelf laptop at staples today.
Maybe a packaged gaming rig of the period, but probably not this one. It's not a High End build, it was Ultra High End.
I would guess overall, it's still got a little more grunt than the off the shelf Staples laptop stuff of today. Just the hard drive platform will smoke the shit out of a laptop - RAID'ed 10k RPM Raptors (striped) on the OS/Apps, and so forth. The ALU may not keep up due to RAM bandwidth, however real world throughput will be right there. The SLI video subsystem is probably on par with or even a bit above the average ATI laptop.
But yeah, at 6+ years old, it's almost an antique and time for a full hardware update - another year of two and the iPhone will probably give it a good run for the money! Video, processor, mobo, RAM and Operating System will be upgraded. Probably keep the customized Koolance water cooling system and definitely keep the Lian Li case, hard drives and PCP&C power supply. I always wince when I build a high end rig, but they last the longest and I run them longer than a mid point build. At least I can re-use about 1/2 of this one in it's successor.
Thinking back about the first XT clone I had with 640K of RAM and a 10mhz 8088 8 bit processor, 20 meg HD. That was a screamer, with the Turbo buttion on the front of the case and MS DOS 3.3.
Geez, some of you guys weren't even born yet when I had that old turd. Turd? The Ulitimate Turd was my first PC, a 1984 TRS-80 Model 4 with 180k 5 1/4" floppy drives and 64k of RAM, a Z-80 processor that clocked out a less speed than the DOHC ZC will turn on a good day! That was a real turd. Monocrome green UV spewing monitor.
