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No Need to Upgrade that PC?

An anonymous reader writes "The Washington Post (free reg.) has an interesting article about a developing trend in the computer retail business: People aren't buying new PCs. Why? Well, no suprise to those who read this, but grandma and Joe Sixpack don't need a screaming new P4 to surf the net and write letters. Are they just figuring this out?"

12 of 490 comments (clear)

  1. Erm windows? by shish · · Score: 5, Funny

    Computer power goes up, windows's speed remains constant. If we lag behind with hardware windows'll be going *backwards*

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    1. Re:Erm windows? by Hollinger · · Score: 5, Funny

      Well, I suppose this has always been true:
      Intel Giveth, and Microsoft Taketh Away.

  2. No will need to upgrade by pardasaniman · · Score: 5, Funny

    Until KDE4 is released

  3. But ... but ... by kcbrown · · Score: 5, Funny
    Intel keeps telling me that a new P4 will make the internet go sooo much faster!

    I'm so confused, I just don't know who to believe anymore!

    :-)

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  4. Re:IN SOVIET RUSSIA by mini+me · · Score: 3, Funny

    In Soviet Russia, computer upgrades you!

  5. games? by Flamesplash · · Score: 4, Funny

    Computers were designed to play games? Maybe someone should have clued Babbage, Turing and the rest into this a while ago. We could have some kick ass gaming machines now, though they probably couldn't run notepad.

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  6. Re:Obviously.... by FauxPasIII · · Score: 3, Funny

    > They aren't playing ANY of the latest games.

    Sure they are, they're just playing them on their Playstation 2 like sensible people. =)

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  7. Using a computer to play games... by cprincipe · · Score: 2, Funny

    ... is like using a big, huge, truck to drive 10 miles back and forth to work in..

    Oh, wait......... :-)

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  8. Re:It IS news to the readers by jellybear · · Score: 5, Funny

    They need to teach grandma how to rip DVD to divx. That'll get them buying the P4's

  9. Not so fast... by KoReE · · Score: 2, Funny

    While the statement about joe user not needing a faster PC to read email and type the occasional letter is true, I'm amazed at the number of average users that have to have the newest, biggest thing. It's a keeping up with the Joneses type of thing. I run an ISP, and all the time, I'm getting new users signing up that brag to me about the specs of their computers. "Yep, I got me a Pentium XV 5 billion megahurts w/ 9000 megabites in the hard drive, and 3000 GBs of RAM, er wait, flip that there around. My next door neighbor just got one from Dell, so I had to upgrade. Got great financing, just $10 per month fer the next 50 years. It's great for playin' ma new Deer Huntin' game. It's a great game, it's called "Redneck Christmas" and came out on the first day of Deer Huntin' season. Minimum requirements is a 1024 MB video card so it can render them pretty 16-point bucks.

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  10. My wife doesn't like beige by fciron · · Score: 2, Funny

    I am writing this from our six month old P4 with XP.

    When our 166 mh pentium died (MB problem) I picked a cheap little pIII box out of a catalog. I thought that an upgrade to windows 98 or 2000 (whatever was lying around my dad's office) and a dsl line would solve all of our computer problems.

    My wife had a conniption: we just painted, framed pictures and hung track lights in the office and she was d***ed if I was gonna clutter it up with some mismatched frankenstein beige thing.

    It's not all her fault. When we got to the store I upgraded to a flat screen, better sound and more memory. I still have not burned any vinyl to cd, my ostensible excuse for the upgrades.

  11. Comment removed by account_deleted · · Score: 2, Funny

    Comment removed based on user account deletion