Waaaaait, what is this? Are people plugging their wallet.dat into a third-party program to help them play SatoshiDice? Is that what is happening here?  Really?

i have 2-3 spare copies of windows 7, is linux or ubuntu and better than windows 7?

I have been messing around with guiminer and cannot for the life of me get it to locate my graphics card to scope out how it all is set up. Are ATI graphics cards far superior?

From what i have gathered from my research and the comments from Isokivi, nyusternie and Gabi to hold off on the asics until delivered and proven since i dont know the full ins and outs of everything.

I know by doing research that ill be operating at a loss, in terms of electricity costs (that of which i do not pay for rarely), but i was thinking of just building a rough 250Mh/s machine just to refresh my knowledge of building computers and to test to see if i can build a rig. Then possibly look into a FGPA as mentioned before or just build another rig for the benefits of economies of scale. I completely understand that this is a community and also for some a main source of income, I also understand that I will be faced with some hurdles along the way and hopefully i can get to the stage of acquirering more knowledge then be able to impart it on others who are interested in bitcoins and their mining.

any other suggestions and criticisms are more than welcome.
thanks once again

I would like to buy a BFL ASIC miner, but I'd like to run the numbers once they start shipping and can give a reasonable delivery date.  If the ROI starting in January is 260 days or so, I wouldn't mind getting a BFL single. The idea of getting a 100% ROI in less than a year sounds good.

It's better without the case. It gets hotter inside the case. You can set motherboard on anything that doesn't conduct electricity. In most cases on an anti static bag. I have it like that, my second motherboard is set on top of a laptop cooler.