Shuttle Spacewalker, Windows XP and putting the PC in the lounge
I've had a bit of a spending spree and bought myself a new PC - a Shuttle SN41G2. Shuttle make brilliant, tiny barebones PCs (case + motherboard) and this one, their latest AMD offering packs a punch too with on board Geforce 4, LAN, 5.1 sound, plus there's 3 firewire ports (useful for my iPod)
I've also upgraded to Windows XP with this new machine. I'm doing a lot of .Net work now so its worth spending time on Windows rather than Linux (I'm sure the cheque for my soul is in the post ;) )
So far, I'm pretty impressed with Windows XP. Boot-up time is very impressive, and there's a few small things I like, such as the ability to effectively have multiple people logged on at the same time.
I also bought a cordless optical mouse and keyboard. I have the shuttle sitting next to my TV and am using the S-Video TV out to allow me to use my machine from my sofa. The resolution on the TV-out isn't brilliant (I'm using 800x600), but for basic things it works fine.
The PC effectively becomes as much as part of the lounge now as the HiFi or the PS2. I got this idea from a mate who has done exactly the same thing (albeit with a nice projector rather than a 32" TV.) The XP shared logon feature is good since my flatmate and I can have our own users on the machine and not worry about killing the other's applications.
1:06:54 AM 
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