Anyone want to join a Shakespeare party?

Reposting this on LJ to make sure people see it:

I'm planning to catch the end of the Cambridge Shakespeare Festival season. Anyone want to join me?

The plan is for the charity matinée of Measure for Measure tomorrow (Saturday), which is at 2:30 pm at Robinson College. My parents and cartesiandaemon are probably coming along. You can't book tickets for the charity performances, so it's just a matter of showing up tomorrow afternoon. Obviously if you tell me you're planning to come I'll look out for you at Robinson, but it's not so important. The cost is £14 and the charities are a couple of children's hospices.

Tech help?

My laptop (three years old, running WinXP) is kinda dying. It has two big problems, both intermittent.

( details, if you happen to enjoy troubleshooting computers )

On top of that, the computer has become grindingly slow. So I probably need to replace it, though I'm reluctant because really, I expect to get more than 3 years out of a computer! Anyone have any good recommendations for a new computer? I don't want the latest cutting edge thing, but at the same time I don't really want to buy second hand because that wouldn't be enough better than what I already have. (Reconditioned / ex-display / as-new would work too.) So probably new but low to middle range is what I'm looking for.

I may go for a desktop because I already have my Eee for portability, though these days the price differential between laptops and desktops isn't nearly as great as it used to be. Also I don't have a monitor, so that would swallow most of the saving. I am not sure about OS; I would definitely rather have Windows XP than Vista, but might be willing to consider a Linux based system. The problem is that it's hard to buy a computer that doesn't have Vista preinstalled. I don't know, my experiences with the Eee have led me to think that modern Linux is definitely competitive with Windows in terms of being user friendly, and I am not doing at all badly for software. The downside is that I would quite like to play some recent games, not necessarily the latest but say from the last five years. But that's not a high priority.