Moring to you D
I had a busy day yesterday between house chores and deciding to do a secondary (and fresh) install of Vista on a new partition.
My previous install hit a snag somehere about a month ago.
Out of the blue it started to get sluggish when performing tasks (Photoshop, Painter, etc) when it normally blazes through it (I have a Q9450 quad core running at 3.5-gHz, for pete's sake).
So to rule out a hardware problem (RAM or hard drives) I figured I'd kill two birds with one stone and create a 20-GB partition on C: and install Vista with only the bare minimums: no internet, no Office 2007, no anti-virus, no firewall, and all uneccesary services disabled.
Just Photoshop & Painter for making art, and Ableton Live for making music.
So much faster than the previous bloated installation!
If I need to use Office or some other thing, I have it set up as a dual-boot, so it only take about 90 seconds to restart and boot into either version.
Regarding your search for cool tubes: have you looked into a local glass artist who could make you some tubes (boro-silicate "pyrex"-style, like our heavy glass bongs)?
Might cost less, what with the shipping rapage and all that.