How to get a really, really nice dev box

I'm composing this on my shiny new PC. I've been after one for ages now. Typically I tend to buy older, and therefore cheaper, machines that will nevertheless still capably do the things I ask of them. My laptop, for instance, is still a rather modest 366Mhz Indigo iBook, circa 2001. It does what I need it to do, so why change it? I decided that I needed a rather beefier beastie if I was going to do any actual development on it though, so I had a look around. Eventually I spotted this lovely machine going for a song on eBay. It's a Dell Poweredge T105, for those who know what that is. It's technically a server. It has two hard disks, intended to be RAIDed, which I'm not actually doing at present but may plump for in future. It has a quad core AMD processor, with each core running at a nifty 2.1Ghz (not the quickest, but not exactly slow either). It has a gig of RAM (which I'll improve on shortly). In short it's a vast improvement on my previous 600Mhz celeron. I got it for £170. So far I've shoved an old PCI wireless LAN card in it, which works marvelously, shortly I'll be putting a USB sound card in the back of it, and swapping out the DVD ROM for a DVD RW. Before long I'll have a pretty damn decent dev box for under £200. I think that's worth shouting about for a bit! Speaking of shouting, considering the honking great fan this thing has in it, it's also the quietest machine I've ever had, including the one I added a bunch of sound reducing components to. Squeeee!

Rock band

In a complete change from my last post a couple of seconds ago, I'd just like to tell you all that I've recently been in a position to try out a great many geekly things, and reserve the right to be extremely jealous of those of you that have regular and unrestricted access to such things. A case in point is the deeply wonderful Rock Band. I'd never played it until yesterday, and now that I have there is a hole in my life that I previously hadn't known existed. It rocks. That's really all there is to say. Thank you, merseymal , my life will never be the same again! On another note, really, really, really want a projector! Now!