Keep touching that power supply every fifteen seconds once you have that case open. If you don't do this, and you blow a part, every single excuse you come up with for not grounding yourself will sound incredibly stupid. Updates to software generally introduce more bugs than they fix. Vendors all lie. Except the ones that advertise in Computer Bits, of course.
User groups are the new user's best friend.
As the years have passed, I've become more skeptical of new innovations and trendy new things. Now, I tend not to believe in any new technology that is less than a year old. That's probably why I recently invested in a CD burner, why I only installed a DVD player in the last few months, why I do not have a camera mounted to any of my systems, and why I don't have a flat-panel CRT, a wireless modem or any of hundreds of other gadgets that salespeople say I simply must have. In fact, the systems that I do have are probably quite boring to most people. I use a Gateway Pentium III 450 for the bulk of my work.