And as for the races...

• Dell wins the race to get me a laptop first. My Windows work laptop (Inspiron 9300) has arrived, while my personal to-be-linux laptop (DV8000z) has probably not yet finished being built
• ePrime loses, both for itself sucking as a psychology tool and for its installer's USB key driver, like with every other system I've installed it on, blue screening my new laptop
• Cygwin ties, for its installer again dying because I chose an unreliable mirror, but getting kudos for remembering the packages I selected on that mirror and applying it to the next mirror I tried
• Microsoft loses, for choosing such a hideous set of windows defaults