We have a spare high-resolution monitor (23" 1920x1080) at work that we want to turn into a 'dashboard' in a common area that would display performance metrics from our service.
What type of hardware should we look at using for this? A netbook? A fanless PC? Is there any specialized low-power, quiet hardware that I could use to load up a website all day long and display it on such a high-res monitor?
You don't need anything with much power just to display a web page.
You could happily run this on say a small Atom based embedded system (Micro ATX) with a small flash-based OS on say a CF card.
We ended up buying the cheapest netbook we could find and hooking it up to our monitor via VGA. I was surprised but that little machine was easily able to power such a high-res display. Note that we're not playing video, just showing a web-based dashboard.