I have been using laptops primarily for the past few years and now I am planning to return to desktops.  Why?  Because laptops are difficult to upgrade and I am tired of paying too much to replace broken parts or batteries dying over time.  The control key on my current laptop, a Dell Inspiron 8000, is sticky and I can't fix it without sending my laptop off.  Fans (yup, it has two) and hard drives turning on and off is annoying too.

I have been eyeing the 17-inch PowerBook but Windows is my primary target environment so I can't just replace my laptop with the PowerBook.  So I am going to get a desktop, not the most powerful one available, but one that hits the Sweet Spot.  I think that means 3.2 GHz Pentium 4.  So far I am looking at Dell Dimension 8300 with 2 gig of memory, 400G disk.  Since I am addicted to 1600×1200 resolution and LCD (read ClearType), I'll have to get one of those 20-inch LCD and match that with Radeon 9800 GPU.  Even with fastest optical drives (CD/DVD-RW), total cost is around $2400 which is pretty good deal I think.

Only problem is that the price keeps dropping.  Longer I hold off on getting it, the cheaper it gets.  It's amazing that with such a strong incentive not to press the submit button, the computer industry still humms along.  How crazy is that?

After I finish making the transition to the desktop, maybe I'll get the PowerBook (why the heck does it support only 1440×900?) with the excuse that I'll be writing some OS X software.  At least that's the line I am going to use on my wife.  OS X software market is going to explode, honey!