they take up very little space and you get a nice flat screen.

But if you have a monitor you want to reuse, then mini is good.

Tip: Qwest DSL has 'stay up' issues wrt to those awful little actiontech routers they provide you with. The things hang up every couple of weeks and require a power cycle. To solve this for my grandma, I bought one of those light timers like you use when you're out of the house - turns the lights on and off automatically. I have it power cycle the DSL modem daily - off at 4:00am on at 4:30.

.mac is a handy isp with some nifty disk sharing and web serving features (like you can just say "share photos to web" in iPhoto and it makes a web page). But if all you need is email, using your communication provider's isp is fine.

Word processing needs for most folks are handled by TextEdit.app. I prefer Safari (newest version is much better on leaks) but Firefox is available.

You have cron so you can autokill/relaunch stuff if you want to for more reliability.