Alex: Intesting questions. Realistically you need a Pentium, just to run Windows NT. Windows NT will become the standard OS for corporations IMO and it is usually not worth it for corporations to spend time trying to reconfigure a 486. A client at fortune 500 company told me their IT department no longer supports anything below a Pentium 133.
What about advances in other areas: Disk Drives, DRAMs, Modems. Are you going to upgrade to a higher DD, more Ram, a faster Modem or are you going to just buy a new PC at some point. I find it more convenient and possibly cheaper to just buy a new PC every 2-3 years.
Video conferencing, speech recognition, video instructions, HDTV convergance, Cable Modems/ADSL, High resolution graphics, etc, etc, etc. You can delay adoption of some of this, but eventually it will be part of a standard and you will have little choice but to adapt.
Sort of like DOS. Some said who needs Windows, but eventually it was impracticable to stick with DOS.
Dale |
