First the good news. I got it back and it now has a nice big new hard-drive installed. So now I can use my normal setup to make my posting more streamlined. And since it has no camera, I have a laptop I can take with me to the client who does not allow any type of camera onsite.
Now the bad news. Unfortunately somewhere during the process my motherboard's RAM connections got hosed(a technical term). It seems that if I have anything other than the minimum 256meg installed I lose all access to the video. So instead of upgrading from 768meg to 1.2 gig, I have been dropped down to only 256meg ... ARGH!!! Now my system spends lots of time swapping memory like crazy. The only things that have kept me from throwing this out the window are the facts that 1 - I need a laptop without a camera (and all the new MacBooks have cameras), 2 - Even though it crawls(memory swapping to the hard-drive), since my drive is now 7200rpm instead of 4200rpm, it now crawls faster 3 - Its not currently in my budget to get a new MacBookPro especially since I think its being upgraded(with a possible price drop and new chips) by October.
Unfortunately with this tiny amount of RAM to work with there will be no multi-tasking between applications/projects. So while I will do what I can till I get things together to get the new MacBook/MacBookPro, there may be a slight dip in the volumes of posts, but I will try and make sure the best entries make it thru.