Computer upgrade timing

[mdlbear]

This year Over the course of the last 12 months I've upgraded the Starport's three dual-boot machines from home-built 500MHz Win98 boxen to low-end (~$250) Fry's WinXP boxen. I was starting to think that I should have staggered the upgrades, as many people do, and bought only one new machine each year.

But then I started contemplating the recent announcement of delays to Windows Vista and Office 2007 and realized that, if I'd actually done that, I could easily have ended up with three different versions of Windows in the house. This way, I may have unwittingly timed things just about right; I can probably get another three years out of the machines I have, by which time they might have fixed the most egregious bugs in Vista and come out with Release 2.

This still leaves me with the question of what to do with the old machines, but I'll think of something. Streaming audio, backups, diskless X terminals, and fileservers come to mind.