Funny, I was going to open a new thread to ask almost the same question - then I saw this one!
A relative who is a computer techie told me the other day that the manufacture of CRTs was stopping in the near future. I also noticed that you can now buy a 17" TFT for about £280 including VAT which seemed a bargain to me. It's the Refresh AOC LM720A with a 0.264mm pixel pitch, quite basic, but at that price I'm not surprised. It gets a very good review in the March edition of Computer Shopper.
Space is quite important, I don't 'do' games, concentrating on Word, Excel and still photo packages as well as Internet, which is why I'm interested. Current machine is a 200 MHz Pentium I with 3.2GB hard drive (OK, don't laugh!), but I'm thinking of updating soon. I was also quite impressed by a 15" TFT I saw in Dixons the other day for about £190.