And likewise, I've upgraded two desktops and two servers and installed two fresh desktops, and they've all gone smoothly.

Not only did the upgrades go well, but they resolved several outstanding issues (ie. Dreadful performance with Intel gfx chipsets; a pci-express wifi chipset that crashed often on "noise floor calibration" and a realtek gigabit ethernet chipset which crashed whenever you transferred more than 10-20 mbyte of data.)

I live in Australia, and have cable access here.

There is only ONE cable provider in the capital city of South Australia, Tel$tra.

They charge the equivelent of US$50/month, in return for which we get 3000 million bytes.
(As opposed to 3 GB, which would be more.)

This isn't just downloads metered, but uploads as well! So, all the backchannel acks from your http/ftp sessions are counting towards your total.

You can download at around 660 KByte/sec, so you can hit the limit very quickly. After exceeding it, excess bandwidth is charged at the equivelent of about US$0.40 per megabyte.

I just thought i'd let you know how things are on this side of the lake.. It could be worse.