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I've seen those it's almost a bit offending, you propose your effort to help them, and they get almost agressive. Overwealmed with fear.

Anyhow, their P4 1.7 with some ram and no crap, is way enough for all the internet and photo albums they do..

Pariah wrote:

pirloui wrote:

On the other hand, the whole "computer" evolution have slowed down since 2000; five year old computers are perfectly useable today, which wasn't true in the 90s.

I would dispute that. many people have always used their computers till they were quite old. And a big part of that is that, unfortunately, most average consumer types have never in their entire lives used a computer that was adequately equipped or set-up correctly. Most people expect their computer to be kinda crappy and hard to use with lots of lag and stalls.
I have had people get genuinely angry at me for suggesting that if they doubled their ram they would have a much better computing experience.
Heck, even my wife is afflicted with this malady. I am planning of installing a 2gig kit in her PC and she is all nervous about me doing that. She keeps insisting it works fine as it is even tho in actuall fact it's been acting laggy and slow as smurf.

How dare you tell other people to spend money on something!

pirloui wrote:

I've seen those it's almost a bit offending, you propose your effort to help them, and they get almost agressive. Overwealmed with fear.

Anyhow, their P4 1.7 with some ram and no crap, is way enough for all the internet and photo albums they do..

Any guesses on the average AOL user's machine specs? I suspect this is their remaining user base... in which case there's plenty of crap.

An MS dev friend's dad had to be practically forced to upgrade to XP from '95 only a few years ago. Likely it was a whole new machine. Scarily it had business data on it as well as geneaology stuff.

pirloui wrote:

What would be the limit of useable nowadays?
My old G4/450 with 640 MB ram; is actually bearable. Very close to the limit, but web browsing, some photos albums, iTunes and such, works. With a little patience and one at a time, it's not painfull. OSX 10.4.
For a windows PC, things are a bit different.. I would say PIII 1Ghz / 512 MB, (XP or W2000) might feel about the same as the G4 above.
The same configuration could be very useable with Puppy Linux or the like.

It depends on what you're using it for. Given the much larger number of casual computer users today vs. 20 years ago, the market for ultra-low-end computers is also much larger.

Especially since things like WebTV and dedicated E-Mail appliances never really seemed to take off.

Either way - with a 450 MHz G4, you're either a relatively casual user or an extremely patient person. (Or perhaps more likely, you just don't know what you're missing.)