So I said I'd post details on my new bad ass computer...well right now I can't.  I can tell you what I bought...but that's about it.  I purchased a used Dell XPS Generation 4 PC pretty well loaded (3.4GHz processor, 4GB of RAM, 2x 160GB SATA drives with RAID)...yeah, it was pretty hefty.  So I was preparing to load linux on it and I thought..hey...I should update everything while I still have windows on it (that's what came on it) so I downloaded all the latest firmwares from Dell for that service tag and copied them to a SD card.  Well when I executed the BIOS flash it froze...yeah...I bricked it...a mistake wich cost me $192 to fix...DOH!  It turns out that the BIOS I downloaded fixed an issue that caused my pain...dropping of USB during a BIOS upgrade.  Because I had my SD card in a USB card reader and just executed it from there...you guessed it..the process was interrupted after the erase and no more BIOS...  Oh well...