Alright so my little smoothwall 2.0 running on a p2 300 is starting to die, I can hear the harddrive grind from time to time and the best part.... one of the fans inside is almost dead, and makes a nice little high pitched puuuuuuuuuuew sound ever 8-10 seconds (I've counted during one of the few times I watch TV in the 'living' room). So with all this I feel its time to replace my little hard worker with something that will be bigger and faster. My question is, should I replace him/it with a bigger nix'd based router on a bigger and badder machine (2.4ghz, 1gig ram, 40gig drive, oboard gigabit)? or should I get a used cisco/netopia box?

Choices

-Smoothwall (running 2.0 now, 3's in alpha can set this up in about 20 seconds not counting boot time)
-M0n0wall, herd good things. Havent tryd it, does support compact flash cards. Could make sexy little home made case for it and such........but probibly wont.
-Used/lower end Cisco router? Can get a used Cisco 2501 or something along those lines on ebay for about $50 CA. Looks alright, could play with IOS not really up to speed with it.
-Netopia midranged, used these before at my old job. Know them fairly well. Used/ebay aswell. Could be fun to freshen up as they have more manual and hands on firewall rules/chains.

Pros and cons for each
-Boath the nix choices would require a box, that box I'm currently not doing anything with. It could be a good CSS server and I'm kinda so-so about making it a router.....its good, but its a usuable machine! All I really need the router to do DHCP (dynamic ips based on macs), firewall with port forwarding, DNS for internal machines could be fun but i could resetup my dns server, and something like cisco vpn client would be nice. Something small I could pack onto a CD so my room mates could install in there parents machines or what ever...........I HATE forwarding ports for vnc. Also the computers in the house other then one have on board gigabit and would like to get a cheap linksys gigabit switch, would be kinda nice to follow the bottle neck all the way to the router. (but then stop at the 10/100 nic on the wan side....i know might be useless eather way)

So if anyone could state why the would think one would be better over the other please, feel free. Comments welcome, and if you know any other *nix based router software lemmie know (actuall distro would be nice, something a little more then single disk distro like Coyote Linux please!)

Also, this post might be a little needless but its 11am and I've been up and alone on the computer since 1am. Thanks in advance!