Shuttle's new mini PCs

We love computers (as you could probably guess), but since we love the meager square footage in our apartments even more we were very pleased when a few years ago several companies started coming out with so-called "Small Form Factor PCs" — which typically packed the power of a full-fledged computer into a slick aluminum cube barely bigger than a DeLonghi toaster oven.  No more ungainly and plain PC towers. The big catch with these was that you usually had to install components like the CPU, hard drive and memory and build the system yourself, something that (unbelievably!) not everyone wants to do. For all of you who aspire to buy - rather than build – your geek cred, Shuttle's joined the ranks of vendors like Dell, HP and Gateway with a sexier PC than any of the big boys of beige could manage.  They're offering a line of complete, pre-built systems ranging in price from $800 to 3000.  $2499 buys you a Pentium 4 3.4 GHz system with an ATI Radeon 9800XT video card, 1GB of high speed RAM, a DVD+RW drive and a 200GB hard drive - enough to satisfy the most rabid gamer.  $999 nets a super-quiet (and even slightly tinier) Microsoft Media Center PC (which gives the TiVo's user interface a run for its money) with a 2.8GHz Pentium 4 and 512MB of fast memory. We only hope Shuttle's customer service can keep up.