Gartner just laid down the boom and said PC sales are going to completely tank by almost 12%. Of course, news like this makes computer and computer component manufacturers completely freak out.
The computer market at this point is saturated. Proof of this is not hard to find because said honestly, how many people do you know that do not have a computer these days? Probably not that many, if any at all.
What does the predicted (keyword there) sales drop mean to you?
First, for current generation hardware, prices are down.
This is why I am urging people to get while the getting is good and upgrade to a new computer box if what you have is old. Dell has slashed prices as have more or less all other OEMs, and the prices at NewEgg, TigerDirect and other computer hardware retailers have gone down also.
Second, for future hardware, prices will most likely go up.
If people buy less and less PC hardware, the price of said hardware will inevitably go up just to make ends meet as far as the manufacturer is concerned. And while it’s true certain hardware does incrementally increase in price over time, the next few years could see a sharper increase than usual.
Third, even with the upcoming Windows 7 release, this does mean more people will be staying with XP longer.
Because of the sales drop looming, people are being urged to stick with their older hardware. That being the case, an older OS obviously runs better on older hardware, and that screams "stay with XP" for many.
If the sales drop prediction becomes true, the demand for modern computing to work with older OSes will become greater.
My recommendations?
As said above, buy/upgrade now. Go for that quad-core CPU and new motherboard, the 4GB of RAM and the 500GB/1TB hard drive and so on. The prices are really good at present.
Acquire a legal copy of XP. If you don’t have a "recovery CD" from your OEM box with XP on it, buy a license. I did so a few years ago and don’t regret it. And if you don’t feel like spending the cash on that..
Learn Linux. Part of where Linux shines is whenever the computer industry is in trouble sales-wise. Why? Because when the corporate machine fails, the community kicks in to pick up the slack.
What would you recommend for long-haul computing with older hardware?
Your current hardware will eventually become old. What are you doing now to prepare for that? Let us know.
Does this drop in HW include monitors? My brother’s been wanting to buy a few LCD for his PC, but I haven’t noticed a drop over the whole on them.
Good question. The short answer is yes, however bear in mind that out of all computer hardware, monitors are the one thing that over time have never significantly dropped in price. It is a mystery why they always seem to command higher prices compared to all other hardware.
Regardless of that, they are fairly cheap at the moment. 22-inch widescreen models can be had for under $200 at Newegg.com easily. Normal aspect (19-inch) is almost under $100.
Do you recommend a 64bit OS, and if so which one?
Yes. Either 64-bit Vista or wait until the upcoming Win 7 and get the 64-bit variant of that. I wouldn’t bother with XP 64. Runs fine but it’s old. Alternatively you can run just about any Linux distro in 64-bit flavor as well.
For me, I’m going to be sticking with my existing hardware for as long as I possibly can. To get the most out of it, I agree with one of your ideas about linux, so I’ll be sticking with Ubuntu 8.04. It’s the long term support release, so I’ll have support for it for enough years down the road that by then, hopefully, I’ll be able to get that new, powerful hardware that I can only drool over now. This version of Ubuntu can run very quickly on modest hardware. I’ve got an amd 4850e, 2gig of ram and it just flies. Gettin by with what we’ve got will come in very handy in the coming tight times I’m sure.
One has to wonder how Apple will do. Young people are moving toward Mac and they are outgrowing the MS based laptops and pc’s they started college with. It’s conceivable that one day they will be at the top of the pile instead of MS. Now if they could build a shiny, glossy futuristic search engine to compete with Google we would have ourselves an uber company. Maybe they could team up with asus to get help bringing the pricepoints down.