What sort of difference, byte-wise, should there be between an unmodified BIOS and one patched with SLIC 2.1? I wrote a simple C program to compare two unpatched/patched BIOSes for my motherboard and it was ~85-95 kB. Does this sound about right? Forgive my paranoia, but the whole reason I went with a BIOS mod instead of a loader is because rootkits scare the bejeezus out of me. I probably wouldn't be so nervous if McAfee's corporate version AV's overzealous heuristics didn't almost invariably pick something up.
What's the difference between an original RTM ISO from say Microsoft Technet (copies of which are available all over the net) and a retail copy of the ISO that you buy in the store? Nothing afaiac, except fancy laser holograms on the retail DVD. However, I did get a copy of the retail DVD's from being a launch party host. Haven't had a reason to use them yet since I also have a copy of an untouched original ISO installed on a bootable USB flash drive. It's untouched except for my removing the ei.cfg file which makes it allow me to use this installation media to select and install any version of windows 7 x64 I want. RTM = release to marketing = retail iso. Any changes made since RTM have to be acquired via Windows Update or by downloading standalone updates from MS.