I'm spinning up my father in-law's new Dell Optiplex 745. I spec'd it with XP Pro, 'cuase man, Vista ugh. Also, that meant I could buy the box with a gig of RAM and call it 'good' vs. the two gigs that Dell says you need for Veeeesta.

It's not half bad. Dell seems to have learned their lesson about shipping machines with a zillion-and-five pieces of crappy software loaded on them. This has a pretty darn clean build of XP SP2, and little else.

I'm in the middle of the Windows Update deathmarch. Since when did IE 7 count as a critical update? Sheeze. I don't know whether to bite the bullet and install it (on the grounds that now that IE 7 is out MS will soon be pushing IE 6 off the train) or say bugger off and tell Winders Update to never show this again (on the grounds that I've made a Firefox user out of my father in-law, and who's gonna use Internet Exploder on this box anyway?

ETA:
The new Dell reduced-footprint USB keyboard *SUCKS*. I have dug out a PS/2 keyboard and mouse to USB adapter and the Mighty Model M is now in charge. Shit, I think the Model M might weigh more than the PC! :-)