Now I have a windows system I like that can load the latest version of opera in under a second.

Doesn't take much to do that.

6 LVD drives on a 3 head controller that cost $2500 new and was part of half million dollar super mini that NASA used to visualize earth hurricane prediction data.

And with that, Opera finally loads quickly under a second. Photoshop in 7 seconds. Okay not the first time you run them, that's longer but they're being cached well because subsequent invocations are scary fast.

But of course with six spindles, 3 cables and a 15 year old raid controller (thanks Brian) the mean time between failures is like "Tuesday". But I have spare drives and controllers and cables and know how to rearrange things and keep data. And lots of ways to rearrange things and *lose* data.