Well reasoned. I believe the tablets, netbooks etc. are there to answer mobility/usability/convenience needs. They're doing it well. Now, even a 3D Tablet. Soon they'll make it to the classroom as well.

The exponential growth is there, just not in desktops anymore.

@ reply 1: SSD means Solid State Drive.

My home gaming machine still uses a nVidia 9800 GT card and it's been very happy with everything that I've thrown at it.  My wife has an ATI 4770.

I *may* update this year.  My wife's computer needs a dual core processor, but beyond that, performance has stayed good for much longer then I've expected.

Clotting at the bleeding edge of the software-hardware interface is only one factor in this sort of thing.

I have several friends who used to more or less make a small party out of getting a new rig up and running, starting way back in the 8086 days. We've all come to think of a new rig as a tiresome chore to put off as long as possible, nothing like the joy of splurging on a swell new toy. Maybe some brilliant person can come up with a corollary to Moore's Law that's about when hardware gets bogus enough that the mass market has no real need to stay in new-rig-crackhead mode?

Probably will.... to a point. Prices have decreased a lot, and there are sites like newegg.com which sell a lot cheaper than the OEM's.

Just win the quest competion.

Maybe a little bribe is in order.   Its too bad the mod community can't work on patronage. The problem is that we enjoy our mods too much to get paid for them.

Programmers need to write sloppier code in order to utilize the vast hardware resources now at their disposal.  Performance testing?  Pfft.

At least when the time comes and I can afford to build one they'll be cheap as dirt ... almost. But then again dirt isn't all that cheap either. Ya just can't win for losin'.

A big part of the reason game companies are no longer "pushing the envelope" on hardware specs is that many are coding games (if they code them for the PC at all) to also run on an XBox and/or PS3. That sets the performance limit for a lot of game companies in order to keep the largest possible audience to make back the increasingly huge investment needed to develop a top flight game. The result is that PCs now need to be updated for gaming about as often as you would update a console. On the order of 3-5 years rather than 12-18 months.

So, like Frogboy, my 2008 desktop is still just fine for nearly anything out there. The only upgrades I've done were to replace a fried 6800 GT card with a GTS 250, add a cheap external hard drive and upgrade from 32 bit Windows Vista to 64 bit Windows 7. I don't see any reason to replace this machine in the near future:

Intel Core 2 Duo E6750 @ 2.66 GHz
4 GB RAM
250 GB internal disk
1 TB external disk
GeForce GTS 250 (1 GB)
DVD Burner
Windows Home Premium 64

Hardly state of the art, but more than adequate to run games like Fallout 3, Dragon Age, Mass Effect 2, and Civilization V in 1920x1200 resolution.

The only reason I upgrade my computer now is because i like having faster stuff not because i need it. I was for a while there completely upgrading my computer every 2 years. But now I've had the same build since 2008 and all i've really done is replace the parts that werent adequate to my liking (Video card), or me experimenting with things (RAID 0 x 4). I want to upgrade this year to DDR3 and Hexacore processing with an SSD drive but its hard for me to find a good reason to do it.

Though i hope that Skyrim does push the envelope of my machine and make me justify a reason for the upgrade .  BTW is Impulse getting Skyrim?

I plan to upgrade to Windows 7 64 bit, and add 4 GB of ram (and thereby use all the slots).

I'm playing with a 3D fractal graphics program. It can take 24 hours to make a 1920 X 1200 high quality render sometimes on a 2.6GHz quad-core, so a lot of horse power would come in handy if I could afford it. Other than that, I have no need (except for fast booting) for state of the art machinery.