Thanks to all who gave advice! I am finally running Celeste on an HP
Pavilion G6 machine with an AMD A6 processor:

0 tinyBenchmarks '506930693 bytecodes/sec; 15495322 sends/sec'

I can hardly believe we are still at the 15M sends/sec range. Self did
way more than that on a 277MHz UltraSparc. But the more complex error
handling in Squeak might account for the difference.

Windows 8 is still giving me lots of problems. Just unzipping the
.sources.gz file so I could better debug my file primitive failures was
a complicated adventure. At least the latter turned out to be just that
Celeste was using absolute file names remembered from my Linux machine.
So "self openDB" sent to the MailDB instance got things working again. I
had been afraid that using a Win32 VM in a 64 bit OS could have been the
cause.

Bert:

thanks for the info on the current status of multitouch. I will have to
work on this, then. I am thinking about something like the LeapMotion
thing Tim mentioned or Microchip's GestIC technology. I was surprised to
hear that the XO-4 uses an infrared touch system. That kind of thing
stopped making sense in the mid 1990s.

Chris:

I had actually been looking mostly at Lenovo machines, but at a much
lower price range. The machine you suggested is, indeed, particularly
nice. The computer I actually got cost me $380  (before taxes).

Casey:

the Air is close to ideal but a bit more expensive than what I was
thinking and is more complicated to interface to. In fact, many of my
options didn't have a built-in VGA connector, which is still an
interesting feature for now.

Germán:

in theory the OS isn't important if I am going to run Squeak full screen
all day, but if I can't get over all these silly problems with Windows 8
by the time I get back to Brazil, then this will be a Linux machine even
if I lose a few features due to a lack of drivers.

-- Jecel