That was different.

I run a nice machine (by my standards) here in the homestead. It's a Dell Latitude E6410 laptop, and it cost me a few hundred bucks two years ago. It's not a gaming machine, it's an email, surfing, facebook and media transcoding device.

Yes, I grab music or video from online sources and transcode it.

Don't you?

I recall that in 1992, because I am an old tech geezer, that I bought a 386 machine, a number greater than 286 which must have been better, soon to be be passed by a 486 the following year.

The 386 cost me $4800 with a printer. That's 1992 dollars, and with inflation at say, two percent, that equates to around $7800 in todays money. I needed that 386 to justify a tax return that year, and of course a more important reason.

I needed to play Doom!

That was different, I admit, but today, if my trusty E6410 becomes very unhappy or dead (which it is showing signs of) well I will just have to jump on to eBay and buy another, and the question is, what are they going for at the moment?

Well, the first hits on eBay for the i5 version (sold items) are around $80 to $115 for one that is working and that's about the price of admission to my level of acceptable tech.

However, a respectable Dell Core 2 Duo, or C2D, can be had for half of that massive price tag and will do everything (besides the video transcoding) in a reasonable timeframe.

Five grand down to fifty bucks in twenty five years, does that screw up Moore's law?