In computer news this week:

Christmas is coming and this year you can buy a PC for under $ 1000 ........

The price of PC's has been steadily dropping over the years. 2 years ago it seemed like the PC manufacturers were trying to keep total system prices well above the $ 1000 price point, but now even the big 3 direct marketers - Dell Gate and Compag - offer decent internet ready systems for under $ 1000.

With the PC industry in one of it's worst slumps, these prices may get lower and have more value added to the package, but let's see what you would get today if bought one of these systems.

Dell offers a 733 Mhz Pentium 3 system with 64 megs of ram, a 7 gig hard disk, sound, cdrom, monitor, modem and mouse for $ 849. Microsoft works and other utilities are included in the price, so you have word processing capability and internet capability out of the box. One negative in this package is that you have to subscribe to AOL for 1 year to get this price. Othen than that, it looks pretty good.

Compaq offers a Presario 5000 system similarly equipped for $ 848, but without the AOL lockin. This system also contains 4 USB ports.

Gateway offers a similarly equipped Essential PC with a Celeron processor for $ 799, also without the AOL lockin.

All 3 vendors offer some kind of a discount - $ 50 or more - for ordering your system online.

Thes systems are technically classified as home systems, as opposed to business systems, because they don't come bundled with the standard business software programs, word processing, spreadsheets, database, presentations, etc. that businesses need. However, these systems have good horsepower, and you would just need to buy Microsoft office 2000 or a similar suite to make them into business systems. From there, it's a matter of fine tuning. Out of the box, all 3 of these systems have enough processing power and storage to satisfy most users' needs. Any of them would look great under the Christmas tree as a family or small business computer.

But people and business just aren't buying pc's like they used to. It's as if the saturation point has been hit, and those people who were interested in pc's have already bought and are now on their 3rd or 4th upgrade, and those people who aren't interested in pc's - still millions of people and businesses - still can't see the benefits or the justification for buying one.

In our new Internet economy, some critics are saying that the PC is obsolete, and that the new generation of internet devices and terminals - priced much lower than PC's but without their capabilities - are what people want. Most of the PC manufacturers are already selling Internet Devices; dummed down pc's that can access the internet, surf websites and do email, but don't have the processing power and software capabilty of real pc's. These devices today sell from $ 200 to above the entry level prices of the PC systems available today.

Probably a significant percentage of people who don't feel they need a pc may feel that they can justify a lower-priced internet device, so sales in this area should be good, and vendors are counting on them.

So this Christmas, you can look for really good prices on complete pc systems, and even lower prices on internet devices which might make just as good a present.

For Raw Bytes, this is Frank Delaney

POB 222 Spangle, Wa 99031 (509)245-3736 Email: fdspokane@aol.com