Switched!
I bought a mac-mini today. That’s not what I originally set out to do, but it turned out to be the best match to my requirements.
I started out looking for a replacement for an aging 17 inch CRT. The monitor was acting flaky, losing some color definition until I would jiggle the VGA cable a bit, then it would come back — for a while. I was lusting after more pixels anyway, as the primary use for that desktop is as an adjunct to my laptop to display a few more windows. I bought a 22 inch wide screen LCD.
Widescreen was my downfall. The video chips on the desktop did not understand that aspect ratio. That was the final straw. Despite being several years old and running Windows XP, it had enough CPU and RAM and disk for my needs. More painful was that 10Mb Ethernet and USB 1 limited my throughput. And the CD reader is just a reader. The machine also has many things I no longer need — things like a floppy drive and a modem. But most of all, the machine is hardly “green”. In the summer months in NC on the third floor, the air conditioning struggles enough as is.
The fact that I can now test out applications on the environment that an increasing number of my friends use is a bonus. But first I need to find the command line and ssh.