Your 1800mhz PC isn't much faster than your old 200mhz machine? You been drinkn' the green kool-aid today?
Normal people don't go on clock speed, RAM, and hard disk speed, they go on responsiveness. With my first PC I had to wait hours to print of large colour documents then when I bought my p200 they would print in miniutes but its no quicker with my current machine. With my old p200 I had to wait for the Word 97 to load, I still have to wait just as long for OpenOffice Writer to load. Opening up a Windows Explorer window takes just as long. The only really significant improvement is boot up speed but this is mainly because of an improvement in Windows XP.
In five years time when all new PCs come with Longhorn I'm not going to buy one because it won't be any fucking faster. Yes I do know there's UNIX and hopefully there's decent simulation software on the platform or Wine is good enough to run the Windows stuff. Either way I won't upgrade unless there's a real reason too.
What you were saying about relaibility is bullshit as at work we still have an old 386 that still works, we use it to run old DOS software on.
You are the exception to the rule. The vast majority of people buy news PC's on a 3-5 year basis. That's how it's been for as long as I can remember and I've havn't seen any sign of it changing. Sure, lots of people save old machines for as long as they can, (I have a 500Mhz machine that serves as my router, and my wife uses my old 750mhz machine) but your average consumer wants all of the new whiz-bang features of new PC's and they end up buying new computers - regardless of the usefullness of their current machines. Oh - and I still stand by my assetion that X86 PC's are junk, and are NOT designed to last more than 5 years.
At work most of the general purpose PCs have only have 128MB of RAM.
Like, I said before, I've seen this prediction made over and over in the last several years, yet it is consistently been proven wrong by the market. Do you have any evidence to show that people are upgrading their machine less often nowadays?
My last hardware purchase (athlonxp 2800/asusMB/512 memory) was over two years ago. I did recently buy two hard drives, bu that was because my six year old hard drives were going bad. In computer terms, mny hardware is "middle-aged".
Most peopl's machines are five years old? Again, do you have any data to prove that claim?
Sorry I don't have any data apart form my personal experiance and the people I know.
PC sales growth stumbles in US but global demand keeps orders strong
This says a lot.
PC sales in the US have stumbled!
Why do you think this is the case?
Because this US is one of the richest nations with on average the most computers per person and the best computers too. Do you not think it's likely that they're now happy with their PCs? The rest of the world are still useing crappy computers so they're not as happy so they need to upgrade.