Picking a new PC; advice?

[whitewolf]

ok first thing is the obvious... check your volume options and make sure everything has the volume up and is not muted... sometimes the front and rear outputs are muted by default...

Okay, my speakers are on full volume (though I don't have any speakers), and I hear no sound from my headphones. =(

which thing?... trimming down vista services?...

or migrating to XP-64?...

It might just be so that by the time I find the leisure to try xp-64 Microsoft will stop supporting it. I want to figure out how stuff works on here first, and it's taking a while, and I have to do some work in the meantime. It's a pain in the ass of course. Windows Defender is the biggest piece of crap in Microsoft history.