So I finally got this thing to start working and I'm at the point where I'm installing drivers and baseline software before my standard "Baseline Restore" image. My big question now is what to do about city/titan because there have been some Major system changes at this point.
The first change was that the bios doesn't support pre-Vista OS (and I'm too tired to figure out how to get my 10+ y/o Mac to burn cd's) so I ended up throwing Windows 7 x64 on it. I did x64 because the new specs include double the RAM so I'm up to 4Gb! I manually install All of my software (unless there's no custom option) so my applications will go into a 2nd partition separate from the OS (d:\Program Files\APPNAME). My documents, videos, music, etc are on the 2nd physical drive (4th linear partition drive label wise). The GPU is an nVidia GeForce 8600M GS (256Mb RAM baseline, shared upto 2Gb) and is using the latest drivers directly from their website as HP only supports drivers for this model through Vista x64 (and they wouldn't work :-/). The CPU is a little higher than the older by 10% so I'm upto 2.2Ghz now. :-p
Everything else is basically the same, but I'm going to spend tomorrow getting drivers, settings, etc setup for the backup process. I'm crossing my fingers on my older games though as I'm not sure how they'll like being three OS generations behind. Again, too busy/lazy right now to search. O:)