Everyone has seen the drastic drop in computer prices in the past seven to eight months. Large and small companies alike are luring you and your buddies in with lower-than-ever prices and best-ever rebates and incentives. You must ask this: Why is this happening?

Three years ago, some important person predicted the arrival of a one hundred dollar computer; is this it? No. With all the SEC lawsuits and investigations, are companies scared to make money and have now decided to lose money just for giggles? No. What we're seeing until about Q2 2006 is a massive, industry-wide yard sale.

Thankfully, this yard sale is not filled with junk. In many cases, you can find great computers and peripherals for about one-third their original prices. But there is a catch. As good as some of this stuff is, there's superior stuff on the way and the yard sales are companies doing Spring Cleaning. Retailers just can't put the new stuff next to the old stuff on their shelves... Eating the cost is smarter business for them.

Massive changes to computers and their physical guts haven't occurred for about five years. From 1993 to 1999, it really was a frustrating affair as guts and pin-configurations changed almost every two months. Intel tried this, Intel tried that, RAM was this way, then it was that way and your new computer in 1995 was seriously outdated in 1996.

In 2000, Intel sat on Pentium merely increasing its power and RAM squatted on a standard that allowed us all to upgrade our 2000 computers even four years later with little fuss. That lack of change helped us forget "the old days." Now, revolution is coming in fits and starts once again. RAM is changing physically, video cards are finally changing after almost a decade, processors are blasting into space physically and mathematically in the way they compute.

Upgrades of whatever, wonderful computer you buy today for cheap will simply be physically impossible. We are at the end of a long-time era. The birth of the next-era stuff will have pitfalls and growing pains - but it will be the NEXT-ERA regardless. If you buy now, prepare to be depressed in March 2006.

Intel doesn't make a 64-bit processor yet; it keeps breaking itself in testing. Programs and software are shifting to 64-bit requirements. AGP video cards have been locked at 8X speeds where their Next-Era prodigy can already boast four times the bandwidth (far more potential), but currently similar speeds i.e. 'growing pains', and today's RAM burns to a crisp when pushed to 1 Gigahertz speeds where tomorrow's RAM is already physically prepared for the bigger heat and numbers in speed. Finally, ever bought a Microsoft Windows disk?

At $400 a pop for full versions, that's nearly buying half the computer again. Next-Era machines will have XP's successor, "Vista", built in. Vista's release has been kindly delayed to allow the Spring Cleaning. If you deserve to be frustrated and short-changed, run out and buy a new computer right now. If you game, are a power user, enjoy full functionality and/or don't want a pet dinosaur taking up four cubic feet of desk space, you are super-duper well-advised to remain calm and stay seated until Q2 2006 when Microsoft Vista springs into existence announcing that the yard sale is over.

About the author:

Since Summer 2005, Bryan has been making this call for inactivity to all who will listen. Many clients and students of Dinarius, Inc. didn't heed the call but still he tries. more free lessons and advice can be found at Dinarius.com