Those of you who have made the jump - did you tweak windows so that the often written folders (cache, virtual memory files, temp folders, user folder) are on another drive or did you just install as normal? Of course on a laptop there is no choice, it is all or nothing anyway, but on a multi drive desktop it might be worth it

PS: I used to do that on XP just to protect my files and settings through the regular reinstalls, but things seem more tangled on windows 7 - but when I dig in there are a lot of configuration, settings and files in the hidden folders under the user tree (put there automatically by apps), some of which would be sorely missed in case of a failure and are not easy to back up except with manual configuration (since the files are hidden)

you can buy AI war on impulse and gamersgate as well - less invasive than steam. Impulse has a client, whereabout GG just has a download manager that starts a game download (per game in the installation file, not installed on the computer)

How much time have you got? avid fiction reader here - I cant even keep my librarything up to date... http://www.librarything.com/catalog/iphigenie

As for the Hugo/Nebula list, It is rather scary, I have read most of them  :o