Hi there HYBR|D, glad to hear someone else is going to join in.

My main interest so far has been the hardware requirements and compatibility, as I have some kit I built 1999~2002 that has reached the end of its useful life and needs upgrading.

I guess I have never been much of a one for upgrading operating systems other than the obvious Win95 - Win98 and ME - XP. All that was really needed there was to increase the RAM to 1GB for XP.

I would certainly upgrade Vista to Win 7 or 8 apart from the fact that I need one reference machine for support purposes.

At the moment, I don't see any real incentive to upgrade Win 7 as it is a pretty good OS. If your kit runs Vista OK then I would live with it and just get a new box when support ends in 2015.

I have now completed my main x64 test machine as follows:

AMD Phenom II x4 965BE @ 3.4GHz
Asus Radeon HD 6770 1GB DDR5
8GB Kingston Xtreme DDR3/1333MHz
2TB SATA3 HDD

The scores are:

Processor 7.4
Memory 7.5
Graphics (Aero) 7.2
Graphics (games) 7.2
HDD 5.9

I must say that I am a little suspicious of the HDD scores?