Shoutbox

The Core 2 Q6600 is by far and away the best Quad Core on the price performance market at this current time, but is in general not quite as fast as the AMD Phenom 9600... which I think it a bit more expensive (and the Phenoms which aren't xx50's are buggy).

For that price you may actually wish to look at the E8[4/5]00 instead. These are the 45nm Penryn cores which are supposedly slightly faster than the Q6600, and they overclock a lot better.

As for xp64, I used it for a while, saw no real benefit, and went back to xp32. Everything worked really, but there was some stuff that didn't fully - iTunes and my printer drivers.