Christmas Update: Had a lovely belated christmas dinner with friends, and I bought myself a new computer case, as my current one is a cable management nightmare.

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B006I2H04I/ref=oh_details_o00_s00_i00?ie=UTF8&psc=1

this is the case I got. Here's to hoping it works as advertised.

Kerm: Thanks for the college app support. I've finally submitted the first round of college apps. Stanford, Columbia, Carnegie Mellon, Stonybrook, and MIT. I can't wait until April to find out who will accept

I still rate this christmas as successful, even if I had a bit more work than I expected.

That's great to hear! If you're at all familiar with Windows 7, then Windows 8 shouldn't be terrible, but if your computer was ten years old, I bet you were using XP. Will you be harnessing the power of your new computer to play any games? What sort of a graphics card does it have?

It has an AMD Radeon HD 7700 Series graphics card. I have been playing Starcraft 2 on it (with extreme settings ) and I plan on using it to play Minecraft when I have it installed.