I have been reading /. for about all the time I have really worked in IT, when a few friends and I started out Cybercafe back in Martch '97. The era of Quake and IRC, I will never forget.
Thanks for all the news, and the great comments, who, most of the time are worth spending quite alot of time reading (more interesting than the actual news) ;)

Have some nice parties, "overthere".

I read it first as to be exectured in sweeden... ugh. -jc

This is so obvious, if Microsoft could just jump boat with either webkit or gecko, (or other open alternative) instead of developing their own crap.

I tried googling for a plugin to the search bar but to no avail. Do anyone know away to fix that?

I have used FF since 1 and have never experienced this sort of behavior. Although I have experienced a similar behavior using some pc's but that was everything that had that cycle you are mentioning, not firefox.

I also have been using raptor drives for years now and still have 4 of them running in boxes.. i have had zero failures so far.

If you want a virtual environment, witch in my experience is really easy to administer, you need some sort of SAN or iSCSI environment. Then you have a base for attaching the needed computing power to this storage solution. It will be costly to start up, mostly be course of the rather powerful switches you need to get. Those are easy 10K a piece.
We just set up a brand new virtual environment at my work (university it department serving about 5k people), the trick is really to get the infrastructure in place, network connectivity, and backbone/power redundancy etc. Then we are adding R710 Dell boxes, with 50GB ram(we are upgrading all 5 of them to 128GB next year) and 2x Quad core Xeons, those are cheap, only about 7k a piece. The processing power of those new Nahelem Xeons are awesome! Can definitely recommend.
For a not to expensive SAN i would recommend Dell's Equilogic boxes, they have all the new features, while being robust and built redundant (2 storage controllers, psu's etc), the basic box with 40TB is about 70k.

Since the main concern in my eyes are your aging hardware, you need to migrate one way or the other. Maybe just P2V'ing the old stuff to a vm is not desirable, if you need to update all software. Otherwise it is a easy way to move your old server in a convenient and safe way.

good luck.

Is Ian M. Banks!! He is writing some of the best Sci-Fi these days, one of he's latest is "Matter" wikipedia, do yourself a favor and read all of he's novels, they are so invigorating for the genre.