The automobile industry understands that while some of us want 300HP cars, others of us get by just fine with a 75HP car. Why doesn't the computer industry?


Because the computer industry can now sell us the 300 HP equivalent at about 1/4 the price that the 75 HP model cost when it was state of the art.

Do you not remember the bad old days when you would only tell your spreadsheet to re-calc just before you went out to lunch, otherwise half the morning would be wasted?

Do you not remember what it was like installing software before operating systems became "bloated" enough to have their own drivers built in? I remember installing software that took most of an afternoon, dealing with IRQs and Interrupts and arranging the memory stacks so the drivers didn't conflict with something else already installed, editing win.ini and config.ini and config.sys and autoexec bat and running memmaker all in a desperate hope that somehow I could get it to work...

I see nothing wrong with an operating system that takes up a gigabyte or more of space, when a gigabyte of hard drive costs less than a megabyte did just a few years back. That much storage costs me less than a can of soda now.

Are you going to get rid of your TI scientific calculator and replace it with an abacus because you never ever use logarithms of trignometric functions?

No, bring it on. I have so much transparent power at my fingertips now at a small fraction of what it used to cost, I'd never go back. And while I'm certainly no power user (just ask Tony Fabris about some of the dumb questions I've had to ask him!) the savings that could be realized by producing a lesser computer that more nearly matched my needs/abilities would be minuscule at best.

tasntaafl.