Every three years I buy a new computer. To be honest, in the Web application era you don't really need to change your PC so often (it's just a terminal after all). But, I said, what the heck, let's not break an old tradition ;-)

This time I decided to get a desktop computer. My old laptop (a trusty ThinkPad) works just fine, and I wanted to try a bigger screen. A software developer always needs more screen real estate.

To make a long story short, I bought a black Dell Studio Hybrid with a 24'' monitor, 4GB of Ram and a (useless?) Blu-Ray drive:

The machine looks sexy and is quiet (but not 100% silent). I can run a ridiculously high number of concurrent applications with no paging whatsoever. The monitor is even nicer with plenty of room for all my application windows. Hey, even the NetBeans IDE feels comfortable in such a large screen. The keyboard sucks though. The Hybrid came with a cheap 'multimedia' keyboard. I will replace it with the standard Dell keyboard ASAP.

Oh, and this is my first encounter with Windows Vista. Not bad, but I will stick with my familiar Ubuntu desktop.