Are PCs having TOO MUCH computing power?

[Gorby]

Esp when most PCs are not being used to play DirectX games....

I recently purchased an EeePC net book, to go travelling to Europe on
vacation. It has an (by modern standards) underpowered Atom CPU, running
at 1 and a bit GHz. I used it to do email, browse the web, face book,
Skype, store photos and a bit of word processing. It worked fine!

I agree, that we don't need the high powered PC most people are buying.

An interesting point: Microsoft must be pissing off Intel, with
Windows7! Win7 uses less resources than Vista, and maybe even XP. I have
upgraded my EeePC to Win7, and it runs even quicker.

Says something about how bloated software had become accepted. The
superquick CPUs were able to make those inefficient OS's and programs
run acceptably. Let's hope the trend in smaller, and more efficient,
OS's and programs continues.

 

[Mickel]

Depends on what you mean by accepted. I still primarily
recommend WinXP _until_ someone can name specific, _real_
needs for a more bloated OS. That is, unless the system
came with Vista or Win7 already on it.

I used to feel the same way about Win2k though, but over the
past year I've seen more and more hardware drop driver
support and software either clearly stated as non-supported,
or unofficially dropped as there are bugs due to inadequate
testing which may never get fixed due to apathy and/or
support cost & time issues.

You only just started recommending XP 1 year ago?!?! I feel sorry for some
poor sod who now has win2k on their 13 month old PC.