I've been having hardware trouble with my main machine for a couple of months.  It's a dual Athlon-MP with 1.5GB Ram that I built in 2003.  I realize computers don't last forever but I was expecting to get more life out of it than this.  Finally, last week it started flaking out and became totally unreliable.  I opened the case and swapped parts for a while but nothing helped.  Time to buy a new computer.  I labored over whether to build a new one or buy a manufactured PC like a Dell.  I haven't actually bought an off-the-shelf computer for over 10 years but I'm a little tired of building them.  I'm no fan of most manufactured computers like HP for a number of reasons including the whole concept of a "restore" disk.  So, I spec'd out dozens of different computers, parts, etc.

After much deliberation, I bought a 24" iMac.

I confess, I fell for the marketing.  I'm hoping it lives up to the hype.  It's supposed to be delivered tomorrow.

The allure of OS X was too much to resist.  Bootcamp/Parallels pretty much made the deal.  I have grown, right or wrong, utterly dependent on Quicken.  However, Quicken Mac is less than stellar, nay less than acceptable, if one can believe the reviews all over the internet.  Besides, I still have my laptop, which is currently running Ubuntu.  If all else fails, I switch it back to WinXp.

Hopefully tomorrow evening I'll be making my first post from aqua.

Cheers.