CompuServe Messages

I don't belieE you are refering to the US market when you refered to megas and Hard drives being a good investment. Most computer hardware is not a good "investment" I consider it a necessary evil to do the job. Since I've been buying computer hardware circa, 1977, there has been one constant. { Anything you buy today should be usable today because it will be better and cheaper tomorrow. Therefore, anything you need for tomorrow should be bought tomorrow.} Translated to time numbers: Hardware is generally obsolete in 4 to 6 months. This obsolescence is in speed and power vs. $. eg. I purchased a MB with 0 meg RAM for $1550.00 in 1990. Today this same MB with a better chipset, better bios, more compact, and higher cache is available for $135.00. That same year I bought a 210 meg HD. for $635.00. Today I just priced a 545 meg HD for $535.00 and a 345 meg for $295.00. I will agree that RAM is a good investment because in the US it is traded as a commodity. The recent price hike in January we noticed was due to the threat of a retroactive tax on asian memory chips. Prior to that announcement we saw memory slowly coming down. The wait and see is for CPU upgrade only. The big boy on the block right now is the 486-66 as far as $ gross sales. Once a competitive chip such as the DX3, Pentium, or Alpha/NT hits the market the prices of 486-66 will drop off fast. Its just repeat of history, Ana. I can buy a MB with DX2-66 as cheap as I paid for a 486-33 MB last fall just 7 months ago. A friend of mine bought an EISA machine in 1990 and paid (3 year loan) total P&I $6200.00 He never used the EISA slots until two months ago. He also just bought a 486-66 for $505.00 to upgrade. I figure if he didn't buy latest fastest out but instead bought 1 year old (obsolescence cycle in 1990) technology he could have saved $4000.00. Now there are those that will say it doesn't matter what the cost if you can balance the books with a return on investment in the obsolescence cycle I've described. My business can't; but, I can by buying 6-9 month old technology. To make matters worse, our tax structure requires that computers and software be depreciated in 5 years. The only thing in my computer that's five years old is a $40.00 serial/parallel card that I could buy today for $9.00. Regarding future of 3DStudio: Just wait until siggraph because Gary said he will tell all at that time. I would bet we will see a Windows NT version in the future (but not rel. 3) though because so many software companies including Autodesk are betting on Win NT. I was hot on it before Comdex. After Comdex I really cooled to it. All that hype and no release or ship date announcment made me suspicious. Then little limitations were leaked such as real speed benchmarks on the 16 bit apps running in Win NT that were slower than under DOS and the system crash problems of dos apps and win3.1 apps. I lost my enthusiasm. Bottom line, at least for me is upgrade