Granted, it is a little beefier specs-wise, but I have the Win 10 Pro 64-bit Preview installed on a Dell Inspiron 530 from mid-'07 and it is running great. It is a Core 2 Quad 6600 (2.4 GHz), has 6 GB DDR2 RAM, a 120 GB Crucial SSD (hacked BIOS re-enables AHCI that Dell removed), 1 TB WD Blue HDD and a 1 GB Radeon 6450.

It works fine, plays 1080p video with no issues but is loud and puts out a lot of heat (105 watt processor). I am looking forward to replacing it with an Intel NUC later this year when the Skylake models are released. About an 80% reduction in power consumption with better performance.

I've upgraded it with scavenged parts to 6 GB RAM (could use more but DDR2 is expensive), a 1 GB Radeon 6450, Crucial 128 GB SSD boot disk and a WD 1 TB data drive. It works great and is surprisingly peppy (I don't game on it, obviously). Originally it only supported 4 GB of RAM, but Dell put out a BIOS update a few years ago that bumped it to 8 GB. And there is a hacked BIOS out there that re-enables the AHCI that Dell removed so the SSD pretty much maxes out the 3 Gbps SATA port. Very impressed after adding the SSD - it boots up in about 10 seconds with 8.1 64-bit.

Yeah, I have had Charter in FW for going on 10 years and it's been good. The customer service had a bad period but has gotten good again. We had a storm come through a couple weeks ago; a neighbor's tree limb fell and took out our cable line. I called them at 9:45 p.m. on Saturday night, got a friendly, not-outsourced person who scheduled an appointment, then got a confirmation call from dispatch about 15 minutes later. The tech was there at 10:00 a.m. on Sunday morning.

The actual internet service has always been solid with maybe one or two short outages a year. And this is different than in the past, but a modem is now included as part of the deal, so you don't have to lease one or buy one outright like with other providers. We have 60/5 (their slowest speed) for $39.99 (regular price is $59.99 when the promo expires) but if you call up and complain enough they will eventually give you a new promo.

I bought an Xserve for my all-Mac department at work (student publications at a big state university) a couple years ago and it has really been outstanding. It's simple to administer, made well, with nice attention to detail, and is reliable and easy to use. I doesn't do a whole lot aside from being a file server (no web serving or anything like that) but it has a heavy, 24/7 load from up to 60 concurrent users, most doing network-intensive things like building newspaper pages, editing D-SLR photos, archiving HD video, etc. It takes it like a champ and only gets restarted when there is a security update.

That said, we have used a dual G5 Power Mac tower with 10.4 OS X Server for a server box for our arcane old Mac-based accounting software for nearly five years and it has also been dead-nuts reliable. It runs 24/7 and also does some light web- and file sharing and has been trouble-free as well. I will be replacing it over the winter break with a new Mac Pro with 10.6 Server.

I installed Win 7 Ultimate 64-bit on my cheapo two-year-old Dell desktop (AMD 3600 x2, 4 GB RAM, GeForce 7300LE) and it is running beautifully. I had to wipe the drive since I had the 32-bit Release Candidate Installed, but that was painless. I just copied my user folder to an external drive, formatted the hard drive, did a clean install and then copied my stuff back. The install only took about 10 minutes! Copying my stuff back and forth was actually the most time-consuming part.

I think most people just have crappy stereos.

Over the years I have pieced together a modest setup in my house (Onkyo receiver, 6.5" Infinity bookshelf speakers and a 10" Cerwin-Vega subwoofer behind the couch).

It sounds pretty good to me, but it always blows away people who come over. It seems most of them use computer speakers or little mini-systems, and hearing music on a powerful, full-range system is sort of a revelation to them.

The first mini-USB device I bought was my Nikon D50 back in 2005. Then I bought a T-Mobile G1 in November and got a TomTom nav system for Christmas.

They all have mini-USB and it is so convenient. I can use the same car charger to power the TomTom and charge my phone, and I can use the same cord to connect all three to the computer. The G1 will also charge from any USB port so that is handy.