<HTML><BODY style="word-wrap: break-word; -khtml-nbsp-mode: space; -khtml-line-break: after-white-space; "><BR><DIV><DIV>On Jan 23, 2007, at 10:39 PM, Steve Hodge wrote:</DIV><BR class="Apple-interchange-newline"><BLOCKQUOTE type="cite">On 1/24/07, <B class="gmail_sendername">Brian Wood</B> <<A href="mailto:beww@beww.org">beww@beww.org</A>> wrote:<DIV><SPAN class="gmail_quote"></SPAN><BLOCKQUOTE class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;"> If it weren't for a certain bloated OS most consumers could get by<BR>just fine with an 8088 CPU. Except for HD playback, de-interlace and<BR>transcode even Myth users don't need much CPU, but a lot of disk I/O<BR> bandwidth.</BLOCKQUOTE><DIV><BR>You are exaggerating. An 8088 doesn't have enough power to display jpegs at reasonable speed, let alone handle mp3s, and forget video. Unless "most consumers" do nothing with their computer but handle email an 8088 is not going to be enough. A 33MHz 386, maybe, but pretty standard stuff like ripping CDs to mp3 would be pretty painful. <BR></DIV><DIV><BR class="khtml-block-placeholder"></DIV></DIV></BLOCKQUOTE><DIV><BR class="khtml-block-placeholder"></DIV><DIV>Well perhaps I *was* exaggerating to make a point. Most consumers do email and web browsing, and some of the graphical content of modern web sites does take some CPU to deal with.</DIV><DIV><BR class="khtml-block-placeholder"></DIV><DIV>In any case a working 8088 machine these days would probably be worth a lot, more or less like a VW Beetle in good condition :-)</DIV><DIV><BR class="khtml-block-placeholder"></DIV><DIV>The original point being that you can get some really good deals on "obsolete" hardware that will work just fine, even ripping CDs would just take a little time and can be done overnight. A working Myth machine for $200 is not unreasonable, not including the display of course, but most of us already own a TV set of some sort.</DIV><DIV><BR class="khtml-block-placeholder"></DIV><DIV>It's all a question of whether you have more spare time or more spare money I guess.</DIV><DIV><BR class="khtml-block-placeholder"></DIV><DIV><BR class="khtml-block-placeholder"></DIV><BR></DIV><BR></BODY></HTML>