Old kit:

Left to right : A 15" Trinitron at 1024x768, clear but slightly dim and very sepia, VGA. A 20" Apple-branded Trinitron at 1280x1024, slightly dim and slightly fuzzy, DB-25 to VGA to KVM, which is plugged into VGA to DVI adapters. A 15" Apple-branded Shadowmask (?- non-Trinitron for sure) at 1024x768, excruciatingly fuzzy but very bright with excellent color, DB-25 to VGA.

New kit:

Two 19" Hanns-G 1440x900 DVI monitors and one 20" 1680x1050 VGA Acer.

The Acer is great for the price, but the KVM doesn't like it - in order to run it at the correct rez, it has to be plugged directly into the machine. So the KVM is now a KM, which is a bit meh. Color is great, contrast is good, viewing angle is sweet, and the brightness came factory default at Supernova - fine after toning it down a bit.

The Hanns-Gs are a slightly different story - the viewing angle isn't nearly as good, color had to be adjusted somewhat, and the righthand display has one dead pixel. DVI works fine, though I can't get full framerate fullscreen video using the PCI bus (probably because I'm running the OS off of a SATA PCI card). For the price, the Hanns-G is pretty good - but the next time I'm in the market for monitors, I'll be sampling a different model or manufacturer.

Overall, I'm pretty pleased with the new gear. Massive improvements in contrast, color, and overall clarity.

Other, off-screen upgrades:

Replaced the dead 160g SATA drive in maniac with a brand-new 320, replaced minerva's optical with the same model drive and moved the replacement into maniac (so both machines have 16x dvd burners). Mucked up the configuration of a Linksys WRT54GL - I'd be irritated about that if my low roll on the nerd d20 wasn't overshadowed by my sister's iBook dying the same night.