The only thing I see wrong with what you ask is that so much is revolving around multimedia these days. Think of how many people want to look at things on YouTube, or watch movie trailers, or listen to any other programming requiring sound and moving video. I have a few older machines, one being an Athlon 900 machine, which runs XP like a champ, does fine with browsing, and any productivity applications run like ‘butter’ - but, if I try to run any sort of HD content full screen on this machine, it drops to its knees like an asthmatic running a marathon. It just will not do a good job of it - using Win9x on the same machine will cause problems because of the maximum amount of memory that OS will address at one time. It just won’t work with any 16 bit OS available. What might work is a renewal of Windows 2000, with the appropriate upgrades - that would work, and could be sold for $50-$70 - not as cheap as what you suggest, but if it was offered with no built in time of expiration, people would buy it. For the same reason that Ford sold many more Pintos than Lincoln Continentals it would make sense to do this sort of thing, but MS just doesn’t get it. IBM could have done this with OS/2, but they also did not seem interested.

I agree with your comments, but just wanted to add……..

We just had a big hoopla about “Earth Day” and it would seem that MS could really help out tremendously in this regard.

Instead of forcing all consumers to throw 5-10 year-old PC’s in landfills, why not design an OS that helps out those of us who would rather keep these things a little longer and squeeze some productivity out of them?

I’m thinking of a replacement product at the Win 98 level of “bloat” that would have advanced, stable code without all of the bells and whistles. They could market to consumers (home-PC) as an alternative and offer it at a reasonable price, say $19.95. I’m quite sure this OS would sell like hotcakes!

I suppose this sounds like the blubberings of a mad-man, but it is quite do-able. And believe me I have tried Linux alternatives, but they are a hit-and-miss where hardware support is concerned. And if all of those folks offering Linux alternatives can work for free, then why doesn’t MS try this as opposed to coming up with yet another OS (Vista) that makes people have to prematurely scrap hardware?