How could I not post it! We just voted in a new leader.

Governments should be afraid of the people!

"that a desktop computer uses about the same amount of power as an incandescent light bulb?"

Is that really true? Most incandescent bulbs use 60 or 100 watts of power. Desktop computer power supplies nowadays provide three times that at the very least.

But aren't actively using most of the capacity most of the time.

Also, lamers^Wgamers like to overspec their power supplies because otherwise their cheap crappy power supplies undervolt some of the rails when they are running the CPU/video card hard.

Yup. Been there, done that, had spontaneous reboots which went away when I replaced a cheap generic power supply with a (higher rated) Antec. The scorched ATX power connector was a bit of a giveaway :)

I've no idea what my main desktop draws (the figure is from a computer with old hardware), but while all the components have high power ratings I rarely push them anywhere near that. I've never heard the CPU fan approach anything near full speed, even when playing the Crysis demo (and that's with a quad-core Intel).

They provide that, but they don't necessarily use it. I've got a spare machine set up as a server (first-gen Athlon 1.3GHz, 1GB ram, nVidia Vanta graphics, average IDE hard disk, zip drive, pair of optical drives, sound and modem), and it's fitted with a 430W Antec PSU. The actual draw, however, is only about 70W (measured with one of those inline power meter thingies).

For comparision, my laptop (first-gen Pentium M 1.5GHz, 1GB ram, Intel graphics, 60GB disk, 1024x768 LCD, 802.11g PCMCIA card) draws about 10W when idling according to IBM's battery utility. Charging is another matter: peak charging power is in excess of 30W and that's on top of running current.

Where was MS still selling it? Who knows what the cost of 3.1 is now...

I would be impressed if my desktop ever used that little. To be fair most of the drives should be powered down a fair bit, but still...

And the express, yey that train, it is a good way to get into London.

Various niche markets. For example, one of the major airlines (I forget which) was using it to run their in-flight entertainment software. Horsham library was also using it until a few months ago on their catalogue PCs - they've since "upgraded" them to a web-based interface, which is less user-friendly, slower, requires more steps to find out anything and doesn't give you the information you want. But it's web-based, so it therefore must be an upgrade.