2007 is the year Microsoft OS flopped big time, Vista has received no big welcome, not by end users, not by big companies. Hardware manufacturers were ready to profit of the increased system requirements for Vista, but this turned out a bad idea in the end, since Vista didn't sell very well, hence memory prices reached a new low this year, as well as VGA cards being available at half the price of the last year's high end products with the same performance.

Let's hope XP SP3 has a few years still to live, so we can forget Vista and the fake marketing trick called DX10. As it currently stands, nothing is keeping Microsoft from providing DX10 for XP, they just want to push their bloatware Vista which takes up to twice the PC power to run half as good as XP.

I made a fresh install with SP3, besides faster boot/shutdown there are no improvements but it certainly keeps an install much cleaner than all those updates.

PSU manufacturers probably hate the second half of the year with everything becoming a lot less power hungry just after they went on the 1KW+ trend.

The prices are really exciting, we got a cheap highend card (8800GT), a cheap Quadcore (Q6600), a cheap highend chipset (P35) and cheap fast memory (DDR2 800). I can't see a reason to complain.


2008 has potential, LED backlights in LCDs, improvements in SSD availability, speed and price and cheap 45nm Intel chips.

time that they come up with something catchy ;-)

Much of what was good in early 2007 is still good now. Anyone who made a purchase then has made good for the money. It has everything to do with Intel & Nvidia dominance in 2007. You can get more of the same cheaper now but the performance won't differ much, relatively anyway.
So I agree. Nothing fancy happened. This year will be quite a lot more interesting.

Q6600 went from $850 to $266
X6800 went from $999 to $266 (E6850)
8800GTX performance can now be had at half the price (8800GT)
Infamous R600 can be had for half the price with a third the power consumption
DDR2 fell from $200 to $20 per 2x1GB 800MHz kits
DDR3 fell from ~$800+ to <$200 per 2x1GB kit

Y'all have some good points... not much new has been introduced, but having yesterdays best tech at even budget prices is just as good, if not better.

but the future may not be as promising, with less competition the next new might be expensive for quite a while

ATi is still in the running... An Nvidia insider commented the 9600 performs double a 8600... no question that Nvidia will be around.

AMD is having all manner of problems, but if they have any plans for staying in business then they are making sure their 45nm transition this year goes better. Phenom still scales better than Clovertown in HPC setups, and Intel is going to have to deliver on Nehalem and not stumble either.

8800 = 2x8600 already now;)

The sooner memory manufacturers switch production to DDR3 and price them to below $150 2x1GB, there is a silver lining for them not to go too deep into financial chaos. The move could also stimulate sales of motherboards supporting DDR3.

The last DDR2 took longer to become mainstream because AMD was doing well with its S-939/DDR.