It's a strange world, IT Hardware development.

The past 18 months have been about the GFX industry - we've gone from what, 3Ghz to about 3.8 in that time, but from Geforce 4 & Radeon 8500's to X850PE's and 6800's - HUGE leaps in performance.

BUT

Hard drive PERFORMANCE has stayed about the same, for the home user, for about 5+ years.

Yeah, sure, there's the 8 and 16Mb Caches 7200rpm drives, but they're still, imho, THE bottleneck of a modern system. Proof lies in the fact that my home machine runs on a 72Gb WD Raptor SATA 10,000 RPM drive that's derrived from a back-office intended SCSI drive.

What's really pathetic is that everyone I know who uses computers agrees with me, w.r.t. Email, Word, Excel etc - a modern machine is often slightly slower to achieve things that they were doing 7, 8 years ago on a P75 with a 250Mb HDD.

However much hardware we throw at the home market, Bill et al. manage to reduce it to a crawl.

doug