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Although the Bureau of Labor Statistics puts $1.00 in 1988 at $1.87 today, the real rate of inflation is much higher. From a popular perception standpoint, Wal-Mart's low prices are masking the double-digit inflation in healthcare, education, and housing (prices are still historically high relative to wages). From a BLS calculation standpoint, BLS pulls dirty tricks like considering only rents instead of home purchase price, considering that houses in West Virginia are equivalent to houses in Arlington, Virginia because they're in the same Census Metropolitan Statistical Area, and considering that an actual DVD player price should be adjusted down 50% because it's technologically superior to a VCR.

Shadowstats.com, which uses pre-Clinton formulas to compute CPI, now has a free calculator. Without a subscription, it requires Photoshop to measure the bar heights, but I've measured that $1.00 in 1988 is over $5.00 today.

512MB USB thumb drives can be had for $3.99.

And that's compared to a 3.5" floppy disk. To try to add some fairness, I avoided a comparison with 5.25" floppies in 1982, which were $1.50 then.

When new formats are introduced, there is a discontinuity in prices. It makes for a sawtooth graph. You're cherry-picking the edge of the sawtooth and whining about it.

one cannot buy XP retail anymore

Note true. Not only are retail versions of XP SP2 still available, it's very trivial to find legal OEM licenses of Windows XP Pro SP3 available for purchase. I know, I recently bought two OEM licenses of Windows XP in Spanish; they were out of stock so I had to wait a couple of months until Microsoft printed up some more.

one cannot buy XP retail anymore

Note true. Not only are retail versions of XP SP2 still available, it's very trivial to find legal OEM licenses of Windows XP Pro SP3 available for purchase. I know, I recently bought two OEM licenses of Windows XP in Spanish; they were out of stock so I had to wait a couple of months until Microsoft printed up some more.

http://www.ewiz.com/detail.php?p=FTM28GL25H&c=pw

Real price, on the web. ~$27 for 10G

There are a number of options; I would say that your least favorable option is remaining with dated hardware. Frankly, it's nothing short of a miracle that 2 15 year old systems have lasted as long as they have without failures.

1) remain using dated hardware. Not the best idea; eventually (possibly sooner than later, with such old rotational storage) you'll run into a situation where old, unused drives will die quickly due to the drying of the lubricants.
2) See if you can't figure out a way to run the same hardware with CF -> IDE adapters. In this case, you'd have a marginal cost increase. You'd still want to keep 1-2 systems' worth of old junk to replace things as they fail.
3) Virtualize on newer hardware. This is, IMO, the best option.

It would seem to me that the primary requirements are:
a) prolonged system longevity
b) static software

In these two situations, you'll have a couple of options, which I will address; but first let me mention similar experiences I've had.

I've dealt with this issue a number of times with my father, who runs a small business out of the home. Every 2-5 years he will get frustrated with how slow his computer is getting (in his case, because he installs a lot of crap) or his hardware starts to fail. Invariably, he will insist that his computing platform should remain static - until I forced him out of it, he was still using a (very crappy) program called Act! 2000 (and he'd still be using W98 and Office 97 if I hadn't forced him out of that years ago).

The fact is, newer hardware simply isn't supported by the older, abandoned Microsoft operating systems. There's no two ways about it. You can't keep using old hardware, even if your software is static, if you want to be certain the information will be available in the future.

If your father is like mine, a big part of the "make it keep working" reasoning is that he doesn't want to have to buy anything new. The reality is that you could replace his systems for a fraction of the cost of what he originally paid for one of them. It's a business, and $500 or so in cost every 15 years is NOT an unreasonable proposition. Cheap is one thing; technophobic to the point of disaster is another.

In my father's case, there was a very sound reason for upgrading his software: it was incompatible with newer file formats. If you've got a closed system (like a POS or accounting package that is the only software you use, as appears to be your case) there's not much of a need.

If you're looking to have systems run for a prolonged period of time, you will want to eliminate potential points of failure as much as possible.

This is what I would do:

* Get two new Via Nano (or similar, such as this MSI Wind barebones for $150) systems with cheapest-possible LCD monitors. IE, on the very cheapest end of things, but newer and all-around better than what he's got.
* Do not use rotational media for these systems. Get a 4Gb or so CF card with an SATA or IDE adapter for each. (yes, the CF will hold up to use just fine)
* Stick 1G (or whatever's cheapest, really) of RAM in each. Get a couple extra sticks, just in case, and keep 'em on hand (because if htey need replacement, it'll either be immediately after purchase, or right around the time when DDR2 gets pricey due to lack of demand/manufacturing).
* Buy an $80 UPS with line conditioning. This is necessary to encourage the hardware to not fail due to a spurious power brownouts and the like.
* Buy an extra USB flash drive of twice the capacity of one of the systems to back up the systems and data - either automagically, initially, once a month, etc. - whatever is appropriate for his use patterns. At the very least, back up your initial install.
* Get VMWare Server (either v1 or v2 - I'd say v1 would be preferable due to the console it has) and install your W95 machines on them.
* Set up each machine to automatically boot, log into X, and launch the VMWare Server c

the Mac Pro is the only PC available today on the market with a Nehalem processor

I know you meant Xeon Nehalem, but Nehalem-based Xeon motherboards and processors have been shipping for some time already. Perhaps you meant "pre-built" PC, but I'd bet there's at least a few Slashdot readers who have built their own Nehalem-based Xeon workstations already.

While I am very glad that eVGA is sending you a new card,if I might make a suggestion,next time you are in the market take a look at the BFG cards. i run a little PC shop and my gaming customers tend to be pretty brutal with their hardware. I have seen machine clogged by pet hair,smoke buildup,poor ventilation causing them to run way too hot,etc. And while I have had at least one of every other kind of card fail the BFG cards seem to just take the abuse and keep coming back for more.

That is why I went with the BFG 7600GS AGP and decided to just sit out the dual core race(I figure I'll wait a year or two and build me a nice quad). Plus the 512Mb of GPU RAM makes FEAR run REAL nice. I bought the card here and I got it for less than $100,so along with the Cedar mill I just picked up here I should get another couple of years out of my machine for around $200 even. But you really can't beat the BFG cards. Even after hours of gaming the card barely gets warm. But as always this is my 02c,YMMV

Techforless,Partspc,and NewBiiz. Between those three you ought to have plenty of choices to build your new box. Have fun!

...and I feel your pain when it comes to paying tax on items ordered online. I have built several systems through the years, and I, like you, am building another one now to replace my old P4. After you have done your research and decided what you want, here are some places to compare prices which will not charge you tax when shipped to TN:

http://www.zipzoomfly.com/jsp/Home.jsp

http://www.directron.com/

http://www.ewiz.com/index.php

For specialty items, like heat sinks, I sometimes buy here:

http://www.frozencpu.com/index.html?id=wdw9Exum

Above all though, compare prices using these useful sites, for you may find the same part elsewhere even cheaper:

http://www.pricewatch.com/

http://www.google.com/products

Newegg is great for comparing parts and reading detailed specs/reviews, but the tax and shipping generally lead to the parts being more expensive than if they were ordered elsewhere.

Intel graphics has been TERRIBLE. We buy ATI video adapters (about $20) to put in business computers we build. (We've never bought from eWiz.com, or the particular video cards shown. That is just an example.)

The X2 3600+ could be had for $65 shipped free with a copy of Rainbox 6 : Vegas since last week. Sell the game for $15 - $20 and get the CPU for ~$45.
Pair it with a Biostar TA690G (the best overclocking 690G motherboard aside from the Sapphire PI-AM2RS690MHD) as well as some SuperTalent DDR2-667 (which seems to overclock pretty well) and you have a pretty nice setup.

Biostar TA690G at ZipZoomFly (the best deal atm w/free shipping)
2GB SuperTalent DDR2-667 at either newEgg or eWiz
If you need a cheap AM2 heatsink and some thermal paste, hit up SVC for the Arctic Cooling Alpine 64 and some Arctic Silver Ceramique

but that's a matter of case design, if the case design can eliminate the heat from the heatsink effectively I would imagine both systems would run at the same temperature

I still don't understand the big need for the QuadFX platform when a dual-Opteron motherboard can be bought in the standard ATX form factor for less than $300 and Opteron 2000 series CPUs can be bought for as little as $208 a piece.

but that's a matter of case design, if the case design can eliminate the heat from the heatsink effectively I would imagine both systems would run at the same temperature

I still don't understand the big need for the QuadFX platform when a dual-Opteron motherboard can be bought in the standard ATX form factor for less than $300 and Opteron 2000 series CPUs can be bought for as little as $208 a piece.

They're only $150 on ewiz.com

If you're a swimmer, here is another interesting mp3 player. It is called the SwiMP3 and it can be worn and listened to while swimming.

Another interesting thought about mp3 players: Apple's domanance with mp3 players makes it harder for other players to make a solid-state mp3 player with more than one gig of memory. The only non-Apple solid state player with over one gig is the SanDisk Sansa M250 (street price lower); this player is made by a company that makes their own flash memory. This is a shame, since the iPod Nano, in typical Steve Jobs style, uses a proprietary interface which doesn't talk with Linux well.

If one is willing to use a hard disk mp3 player, there are 60 gb 1.8 inch hard disks available; I expect to see a 60gb handheld mp3 player in the near future.

You mean the Athlon XP 3000?

Yeah, real tough finding games for that one..

I'm sure They wont run anything nowadays.

The performance we get with Promise controllers (when they work) has been satisfactory. The application is a cash register; the computer is always faster than the operator. We only need a mirror copy of our data.

3Ware told me they cannot boot from one drive, after one fails. A 3ware formatted drive cannot boot from the IDE controller on the motherboard. Promise can do both. We need features, not performance, in this case.

Do you have a link to an Adaptec IDE mirroring RAID controller you would recommend?

The Adaptec ATA RAID 1200A is about $55, about $30 less than the price of the Promise controllers. We have no experience with them; I found the info by Googling and Froogling.

$395 here

includes combo drive.

thanks, pricewatch!

here. I've been using MythTV under Mandrake for over a year now with none of the problems you described including commercial skip. With the combination of Zalman fan for the noise and WinTV-PVR-250 for the high quality hardware Mpeg 1/2 encoding you should be set. If your waiting, this is it. And you get a hell of a lot more functionality (and upgradability) for your buck. And if Linux gaming keeps picking up the way it has, you can kiss that Xbox goodbye too.

Where's the boards I can cram 32 or more into?

Here.