So...I switched sides and bought a Macbook Pro. :)

My trusty-but-slightly-underpowered Dell Inspiron still does the job, but network connectivity has been weird with it lately. Plus the Mac came with Garage Band, and given my self-imposed-resolution to release SOMEthing w/ the band this year, I figure that'll be a huge plus too.

So far I'm even more impressed with VMWare Fusion than with VMWare Server (which I use on another Dev box). I suppose that should be expected, given that VMWare Fusion is $80 while VMWare Server is free. Windows XP Pro installed in just a few minutes! Somehow it seemed to install faster on this machine than on a native Windows box. Very surprising! Additionally, VMWare Fusion was kind enough to auto-install VMWare Tools on the guest OS, set my display settings to a useful combination, and it set up a network connection, all behind the scenes! Each of those items usually needs to be set manually when I'm using VMWare Server. This was definitely a step up in terms of usability.

Yesterday I took advantage of the sale at Macheist.com, and now have a few useful utilities to install as well.

Hopefully this will be the LAST hardware upgrade I have to make for a while! Since I had to spend money, I'm glad it was ended on such an exciting-geeky-note, and not replacing a failed hard drive or some such thing. :)