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My impression over the last year or more is that anything in Silicon Valley is a loser. The reason I think computer sales are down is because resellers are just packaging bigger versions of what came before: bigger monitor, bigger hard drive, faster processor, more RAM, etc. Have you noticed that the box keeps getting bigger?

It is as if computers have a minimum price to be marketable, and like oil production, computer manufacturers keep stuffing more in the box, in fact making the box bigger, to keep the price high. What happened to miniaturization anyway?

My computer is two-and-a-half years old, and I recently saw an MP3 player with more storage capacity than my desktop. But I can't buy a computer the size of an MP3 player with the same functionality!

Here is a list of software I use regularly:

- Windows 98 (Internet Explorer, Outlook Express)
- Microsoft Office 2000 Professional (Word, Excel, Access, Powerpoint, Outlook)
- Norton Antivirus 2000
- Download Accelerator
- AutoCAD r.14 & Mechanical Desktop v.3
- Anim8or
- Openfx
- POV Ray
- Strata 3Dbase 3.5
- Terragen
- Winplace
- Visual Basic 6.0
- Visual C++ 6.0
- Install Shield
- Microsoft Developer Network Visual Studio Library 6.0
- Adobe Acrobat Reader
- Ghostscript
- Power Archiver & WinZip
- Windows Media Player, Realplayer, Quicktime
- Psychedelic Screensaver
- Polyview
- Roxio CD creator

Games:

- Commodore 64 Emulator with 3400 games (500 megabytes)
- Half Life
- Half Life Opposing Force
- Half Life Blue Shift
- Half Life Uplink
- Puzz3D
- Riven
- Myst III Exile
- The Sims
- Demonstar
- Intensity XS
- Snood
- Kyodai

I've got over 1.3 gigabytes of personal files, none of which are mp3 files, and only a few are mpeg files.

After all that, here are the results:

Total hard drive space = 10 Gigabytes
Hard drive space used = 3.54 Gigabytes

I've had no problems using just 64 MB of RAM either, but I've seen ads recently for 256 MB standard, with upgrades to 1 gigabyte RAM available !!!! Holy crap !

So folks, why can't I get a computer that will do all the things I do now, but fit it in my pocket? It seems quite feasible in lite of what is being packaged and sold currently. Opinions?