Old PCsenvironmental hazard 3227

Actually, what *is* gained is the ability to run current software.

If you would like to go into a store and buy a copy of the latest game that everyone is talking about... or even if you wish to view a word-processing document prepared in the current version of the most popular word processor (well, perhaps that isn't fair; Microsoft Word Viewer can still run under Windows 98, can't it)... you need contemporary hardware.

And, it's hard to *blame* the companies making software for making it for the latest and greatest machines. The price of a monitor, a keyboard, or a power supply hasn't changed *all* that much - although those items *have* become significantly cheaper since 1981 - but the performance of a CPU and memory has increased greatly.

Thus, there is no economic niche for less powerful computers - except as 'personal organizers', which lack the peripherals needed to do payroll or accounts receivable, even if they have much more computing oomph than a Z-80 based computer with 64K bytes of RAM, which was able to do those tasks back when.

Most people might not really 'need' something more powerful than, say, a 386SX running Win3.1 in, oh, say, 8 Megs of RAM. But they don't have that option.

John Savard Usenet Zone Free Binaries Usenet Server More than 140,000 groups Unlimited download