This has nothing to do with Vista, this is a direct result of the global financial meltdown.

My corp purchased 70% less new pc's last year and are scheduled to keep that pace this year.

The plus being the PC makers are bending over backwards to sell you a computer. I just bought a new, top of the range laptop for £400 less than their RRP and the service getting it to me was flawless.

From my perspective I think many consumers have reached a point where they don't need a new PC every few years.

More and more applications are moving to the web and run through browsers. You don't need a quad-core monster machine with 4GB of RAM to run a web browser. You might need it to run a slick background on Vista... ;-)

Seriously, this is a trend that will continue. Folks don't need so much horsepower any more... hence old machines will work for many more years for what folks need them for... email and web.

Computer hardware is seriously good these days and has been for a while. Were is not for Windows bloatware and certain new devices, most people could manage happily with a five year old computer, maybe even older.

I upgraded my sister's desktop over Christmas, replacing a dead dvd-rom drive with a dual-layer dvd-rewriter and increasing the memory from 256MB to 1280 MB : total cost £43.00 (about $60.00). It has a 2GHz Athlon processor and runs XP Home - it should not need replacing for several years even though it only has a 30GB hard disk.

Kaled.

on a related note, from Reuters [reuters.com] Intel to shut sites and cut up to 6,000 jobs

The announcement comes a day after the world's largest maker of microprocessors used in personal computers slashed prices on a number of its chips and a week after it reported a decline in fourth-quarter revenue.

it appears the demand is definitely dropping for that quad core super pc.

I upgraded my sister's desktop over Christmas, replacing a dead dvd-rom drive with a dual-layer dvd-rewriter and increasing the memory from 256MB to 1280 MB : total cost £43.00 (about $60.00). It has a 2GHz Athlon processor and runs XP Home - it should not need replacing for several years even though it only has a 30GB hard disk.

Change that Athlon spec to a P4 @ 2.4Ghz, and you have the basic spec for "dummy proof" systems I send out to friends and relatives in need. I can put the whole thing together for less than $100 Cdn.

Although, I also usually put Linux with a nice desktop theme on it, OpenOffice, etc. That way I never, ever get support calls. The things just run and are pretty much bomb-proof.

For a web-surfing, email reading, occasional word processing machine, it really does everything it needs to do.

The capabilities of the latest machines far outstrip most people's imaginative uses for the things.

MY PC is 3 (yes, three) years old and works perfectly for what I do.

don't need a new PC every few years- Yep thats a trend ive noticed to, I used to replace my PC every 12 - 18 months, now its looking like every 3 - 4 years.