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Intel tried this, Intel tried that, RAM was this way, then it was that way and your new computer in 1995 was seriously outdated in 1996.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