Following my recent article on Netbooks, I thought I’d follow that up with some thoughts on how powerful your PC really needs to be.

We’ve reached a point now where the only reason to upgrade a computer is because it’s died and can’t be repaired.  Unless you’re a hard-core gamer, the computers that have come out in recent years will provide more power than you’ll probably ever need.  Here’s an example…

The picture above (you can click to view it full size) is a screen-grab taken from own own PC.  It has a 3GHz Intel core 2 duo processor with 4Gb of memory, so it’s pretty fast and near the higher end of the performance scale.

You’ll see it’s running Vista, which is known to be a performance hog.  You’ll also see two other operating systems running as Virtual PCs, both sharing the processor and memory with the main copy of Vista.  These other operating systems, Vista Business and XP Professional, are also running alongside Windows Media Centre showing a live TV transmission.

So there’s a lot going on here, the memory-hogging TV player and three seperate operating systems, all running side by side on the same hardware with no real performance hit.

What does this mean?  This would mean that if my PC can simultaneously do all of this, then the low power (and significantl;y cheaper to run) 1.6GHz Intel Atom processor inside most of the small Netbooks, should be more than powerful enough to handle your everyday tasks of web browsing, using an Office suite, playing music and watching some video.

If you’re thinking of upgrading your PC today, maybe because it’s having trouble running, or won’t run, Windows Vista you might want to think again.  Windows 7 will happily run on the low power Netbooks with only 1Gb of memory, so might also run happily on your current computer.  You might be able to save some money and squeeze a few more years life out of it yet.