The main speed increases as of late have been in CPUs adding more cores, most apps people use don't take advantage of all the available threads. Here I have a top of the line i7 3770k, a Samsung 840 Pro SSD, 16GB of RAM and Firefox will freeze up maxing out on 11% CPU usage and 3.5GB of RAM. I do use some apps that take more advantage of my hardware but most of the time all that horse power does me zero good.

Most computers nowadays have more horse power than most people need for all their common task, upgrading offers little to no advantage for most and as such is a waste of dwindling disposable income.

Firefox consuming 3.5GB...well, there's your problem, must be a memory leak in whatever version you have. Upgrade/downgrade or try Chrome as alternative until the FF issue is resolved.

Agreed re: most users not requiring a high end quad core CPU to browse the net, listen to music, use an email client, etc.

Those cores do come in handy with virtual machines, however. With hyper threading your quad core turns into 8 virtual cores, which can then be dedicated to, and shared amongst, VMs -- very handy as a Linux user needing to test various flavors of Windows without requiring separate physical machines.

SSDs everyone benefits from, novice or advanced user, a useful upgrade (short of storage space of course). RAM, better too much than too little, 8GB with Windows 8 is probably a safe baseline.

and Windows 8 intro screen is a bit baffling at first, a bit like Gnome 3's WTF do I do, is there something wrong intro screen.

I have over a 100 tabs open in 15+ windows, plus all my addons, the only reason I haven't switched to chrome is my because how deeply extensions can integrate with FF.

I do love the fact that you can build a decent server with consumer grade products, I can deliver low cost servers for my customers using an i7 and setup remote desktop services. The extra cores are great for such uses, but the masses will probably never need that much power, especially when you add an SSD to the mix. The PC market is mature, unless something drastically changes sales are going to stay flat.

simply upgrading to SSD is a huge performance booster. if i were still in IT, I would migrate all PCs to SSD, and that's it.

Simply upgrading to SSDs is also a huge financial drain. It's a difference of about $1/Gb for SSDs vs $0.05/Gb for HDDs. For consumers, an SSD could easily cost more than the rest of the PC.

Not saying it's a bad idea mind you, it's just another factor to take into consideration.

Agree entirely. The recent purchase of a 128Gb Samsung 840 Pro was a game changer for me.

I use a May 2004 Dell Precision 650 running Windows XP every day for VMware, Dynamips Router Simulation, Visio, Outlook, Power Point, Excel, Word, PDF generation. I've got a 150+ Page document open in Word right now.

I realize that a new machine might be a bit faster - but, this current computer has been so rock for the last couple years - I haven't had a blue screen/lockup in 3+ years - that I don't want to mess with anything.

So - I totally agree with you, one of the reasons why Desktop Sales might start to drop, is that for the average office worker, right around 2004/2005, Desktops got "Good Enough" that you really don't need to upgrade.

When Microsoft stops supporting Windows XP, we might see another round of system purchases though.

HP XW6200 workstation (recycled) similar vintage, twin P4 Xeons, works fine with Linux.

I'm tempted by the floating point performance of the newer chips but for normal uses (LibreOffice Web &c) no problems.

Nowadays I only get new laptops when the current one dies, I no longer feel the rush to upgrade like in the 8086 - Pentium days.

My parents are still using my old desktop from 2001 (AMD K7) for their office + web stuff.

the only minor issue with that is that flash is a beast and, to watch higher def videos, you need a more powerful machine

At least on Windows with a proper graphics card, Flash is not a problem.

Not sure about other systems.

Same here, I bought mine 3.5 years ago and it still seems perfectly fast.

I did a speed comparison against someone who bought their's recently, and their's was only marginally faster.

As far as I can tell, consumer disk prices for >= 2TB drives are still higher than they were before the 2011 Thailand floods.

Hard drive makers have been able to make 1 TB platters for a while, so 5 TB drives wouldn't be a problem at all (or even bigger drives, though in the past few years 5 platters have been the maximum). They simply chose not to make them because the demand even for 4 TB drives isn't so strong.

The Thailand floods 2 years back also hampered innovation in the hard disk industry.

An SSD is a fantastic upgrade. If you already have one you're all good.