Hello.
@Duc a la flambe: Agreed, most consumer PC's do come with piddling little HD's ;o) but with the advent of vista and the coming of HD/BlueRay it's unlikely that they'll stay so small for long - they'll be expanded to fit requirements. The majority of users won't upgrade to Vista themselves so PC-Pro will make bucks upgrading OS and HD at the same time. Because people absolutely, definitly need to upgrade, donchya know.
Re the Linux crowd. I find it interesting that one of the reasons why PCs 'won the battle' against the Amiga was (other than not being seen as a gaming machine and having Doom) it's ability to be a multi-component machine so that you didn't have to rely on a single manufacturer to provide it's parts. Open Systems and Standards were embraced so expansion became a doddle. And then we got stuck with Windows! From what I've seen, and tbh I've had limited exposure, Linux is perfectly capable, dependable and efficient as an OS, it's applications are the same so why don't we see more PC's sold by retaillers with a Linux OS as standard? Because MS have pushed Windows a) in a very impressive fashion and b) more recently, as mentioned above, in a very aggressive fashion - "There is no alternative". I know, I know, it goes a lot deeper than that, customer familiarity, software and support availabilty, etc, but what's missing? Perhaps it's a lack of single supplier that causes the problems, people can't identify with many suppliers offering the same product in different flavours. I wonder why there are so many types of vacuum cleaner?
Goodbye.
@Duc a la flambe: Agreed, most consumer PC's do come with piddling little HD's ;o) but with the advent of vista and the coming of HD/BlueRay it's unlikely that they'll stay so small for long - they'll be expanded to fit requirements. The majority of users won't upgrade to Vista themselves so PC-Pro will make bucks upgrading OS and HD at the same time. Because people absolutely, definitly need to upgrade, donchya know.
Re the Linux crowd. I find it interesting that one of the reasons why PCs 'won the battle' against the Amiga was (other than not being seen as a gaming machine and having Doom) it's ability to be a multi-component machine so that you didn't have to rely on a single manufacturer to provide it's parts. Open Systems and Standards were embraced so expansion became a doddle. And then we got stuck with Windows! From what I've seen, and tbh I've had limited exposure, Linux is perfectly capable, dependable and efficient as an OS, it's applications are the same so why don't we see more PC's sold by retaillers with a Linux OS as standard? Because MS have pushed Windows a) in a very impressive fashion and b) more recently, as mentioned above, in a very aggressive fashion - "There is no alternative". I know, I know, it goes a lot deeper than that, customer familiarity, software and support availabilty, etc, but what's missing? Perhaps it's a lack of single supplier that causes the problems, people can't identify with many suppliers offering the same product in different flavours. I wonder why there are so many types of vacuum cleaner?
Goodbye.