Ha,same here. Yet,gonna migrate to Win7 64 though.   

Are you kidding me? I stick everything on high and the only thing that noticeably affects framerates is lots of water.

I have no plans to upgrade my PC anytime soon.  Maybe another stick of RAM or something, but it runs everything just fine so aside from something breaking it's going to serve its purpose for a while.

Macbooks are a waste of money if you look at the specs they can be almost double for the same GPU and CPU. Anyway CPUs are pretty much done due to fundumental laws of phyisics being that they cant go as faster then the speed of light no matter how much power you throw at it. So if you have one from the last 3 or even 4 years ago your probably fine. Graphics cards are still increasing but not at the speed they were. I think we are just waiting for the next leap in technology to come along. As soon as they realise more cores(as we all know mulit-threading applications are hard as hell to make) and higher clock speeds really wont get you to the top someone will come up with a much better alternative....

On the topic of SSD...right now those are a waste of money too in a couple years you will get twice the capacity for the exorbinate prices they are now. So your comp boots in 6.8 seconds....cool?

The xbox ps3 argument has merit aswell. It has its benifits too as games like crysis and other computer games were so poorly optimized they still run sluggishly on computers that were not even concived yet. But games like that make companies push towards faster tec so someones just going to have to make something that needs the next gen power.

I think that one of the things that keeps dragging down the specification of PC that developers have to target, are budget or refurbished PCs.  Take this for example:

Now I probably shouldn't throw stones when even my PC is filled with old stuff that I got on the cheap, but you can plainly see that although a budget or refurb PC is fine for the basics, it is woefully inadequate and a complete waste of money if you want to play something that was released recently.  Nobody in their right mind should buy a PC for gaming with only 1GB of RAM.  A 160GB hard disk will have you constantly uninstalling stuff to install new things.  And the integrated video card surely can't offer a lot of performance.  You'd get more entertainment from a caveman trying to figure out what to do with an iPad.

When decent hardware becomes commonplace and rubbish not so much, then it will be economically prudent to take advantage of it.

Seeing that Dragon Age 2 will use DX11 gave me hope.

Other than that...my system seems overkill 95% of the time.

My home computer is a cheap Dell that cost me $800 2 years ago(hey, I'm a poor state employee, don't judge me )  and I play everything pretty well, or at least well enough.  I don't play online FPS or anything, usually stick to SP games, and it does fine.  I probably won't get a new one for a couple years. 

P4 2.8 single core hyperthreading, AGP graphics.  A couple gig of RAM helps though.

The quad cores appeal to me just because of the mult-tasking.  I always said I might rebuild when I could get a 2.8 quad for the same price I paid for the 2.8 single.  I think we're there.  Alas, I remain a cheapskate on big ticket items. 

I just went back home on vacation, and decided to leave the old laptop, took out the SATA hard disk which I figured to put in a new laptop. Mea culpa, I bought a new Dell laptop (i7, with ATI 1 GB graphics) in a hurry, didnt bother to look too closely under the laptop. When I unscrewed the small panel at the bottom, it was only the panel for RAM! the Hard Disk is inaccessible unless I remove *all* screws and figure out how to pop out the keyboard etc?? Then in a hurry, I managed to delete the first partition (100 MB) which turned out to be the boot partition.. Bye bye Win 7 Home Premium.

The goal was to run XP anyway, I love the Sygate Personal Firewall. Nasty surprise, XP image file re-burned onto the Hard Disk wouldnt load anymore.. SATA sucks.. after spending many hours trying to get XP to load.. I finally restored Win 7 from "Recovery Disk" and went online. Thats when I found out about "Press F6 to load Third Party Raid Driver" which has to be loaded *only* from a Floppy Disk.. Now floppy disks have stopped appearing in laptops since about 6 years ago.. Microsoft have purposefully neglected XP, not upgrading it to run on SATA Disks. Dell didnt have the drivers for SATA, turns out they were available from Intel. Then I found out about nLite and how it could be used to make a custom WinXP install disk incorporating the SATA drivers for XP. So I did manage to install XP.. then installed Sygate, but it crashed mysteriously again and again.. then the XP has to be re-activated within 30 days, but it seems it wont activate anymore. I clicked on some link there and the link is discontinued..

Deleted XP and decided to stay with Win 7. I thought I'll restore all the backups of Impulse games (elemental, Sins, and a few others). Now impulse says you can only restore backups to the operating system from where you backed up.. aggravations galore.

Currently downloading Elemental (2 GB) again, after getting the password reset for Impulse on my e-mail..

Moral: I should have stayed with my Old Laptop.. X-2010. Also, do much more research before buying.

Thats the ipad talking frogboy, you've gone soft.

It starts with not wanting to upgrade.  Then the voice of Jobs will command you and next thing you know you are annoying people about mac products, wearing black turtleneck and jeans, and all your pcs are white.

The only reason games don't push the envelope is due to piracy and the 360/ps3.  With that said, their is still plenty of reasons for getting better cpus and more ram.