It had been threatening to pack in for a while, but one of my treasured 17" DELL CRTs finally decided that enough was enough, and went off to silicon heaven. It had a good run, considering that it cost me £20 from eBay at least 2 and a half years ago - though the P&P wouldn't have been much less than that again.

So finally (probably to much jubilation and mockery of my insistence on using CRTs for so long), I've finally purchased a TFT monitor, and will soon have more permanent desk space available for coffee cups and assorted clutter. The unit in question is an Iiyama 17" LCD 1280 X 1024 Black 2ms. It looks rather nice, and I'm hoping that the 2ms response time will go some way towards changing my opinions on cheap TFT screens. I've always said that I couldn't afford to replace my CRTs with a TFT that could match the image quality and response time. I hope I was wrong. I'm used to the 20.1" Sony TFTs we use at work, and I'm probably spoiled slightly - those things go for around £500 these days, whereas the Iiyama above is less than £150.

Incidentally, I was reminded of some discount vouchers that Dabs emailed a while back, offering £10 off an order over £100 placed by 28/2/07. A fortunate discovery indeed, I thought. Perhaps my late display unit remembered that email, and chose its time to go accordingly. Or perhaps it was just 10 years old.

The identical unit that I'm using at the moment was manufactured at the same time, but seems to have seen less use, and is still very bright without cranking the brightness beyond 60%. Hopeully I'll manage to preserve this piece of computing history until it's 20 - by that point it'll probably be illegal to own, and impossible to dispose of.