I have an old Gateway GT5040 retail PC.  I've upgraded the video card to a fancy dual output ATI Radeon something or other (18 months ago).  I've upgraded RAM (9 months ago).  I ditched my 19" dual CRT monitors for a 20" Asus flat panel wide screen monitor (last month, I miss dual monitors, but love the space savings). I will probably upgrade to a much needed larger and faster hard drive.  (The stock Seagate drive is both noisy and incredibly slow.)

However, Dell, HP and other vendors have a problem.  The PC I own is fast enough for my purposes.  My son is happy with the game speed (it's 'OK' he says.) I'm happy with the speed of C++ source compilation.  I am even satisfied with the speed that Oracle XE and SQL Server Expressions versions are able to provide on this old hardware. The virus protection programs have improved in sophistication to the point that Windows XP, for all practical purposes, is as safe to use as Vista, without the asinine UAC popping up 100 times per day asking "permission" to continue.

Will I upgrade to new hardware?  Probably not (at least for a while).  After living through my son's experiences with Vista on his HP laptop, and my own experiences with Vista executing in VMWare, I do not want to own a PC that uses Vista as it's primary OS.  After looking at Beta downloads of Windows 7, I don't see any compelling reason to spend good, hard earned money to replace Windows XP.

All of these issues, in aggregrate, are bad news for the PC industry.  There is just nothing compelling enough out in the marketplace to cause me to upgrade my hardware and operating system.  From a programmer's perspective, VMWare is a good enough platform to write and debug applications on Vista or Windows 7.  I can boot up Vista, test and correct my code, and then turn it off.

Now for the really, really bad news.  If and when I upgrade my hardware, it is going to be a Mac - expense be damned.  I want a 24" iMac.  Nothing else will do.