A flood of OEM stuff maybe...

I would say that most of the early hardware supported by XP (233mhz CPU or higher) is already out there. Vista/7 require 1ghz or higher so there may be a handful of holdouts on the trailing edge still using those machines. I don't foresee very much new hardware being made available due to the cutoff of XP support. It's not like in the Mac community where each new version of OS X only supports a very narrow selection of machines which immediately renders dozens of machines that were supported in the previous version obsolete overnight causing people to dump them before they depreciate too much. The hardware supported by each version of Windows is very broad so old machines can be used longer. Machines on the trailing edge of support have probably reached maximum depreciation already so there's no urgent need to dump them before you lose too much money.

Sliderider, at least with OS X 10.9 a lot of Macs are compatible. It might have been true years ago but is no longer. Updated a white 2009 MacBook to 10.9 last week and didn't feel slower than before.
Edit: see http://www.everymac.com/mac-answers/os-x-10.9 … quirements.html +/- 6 years is not that bad - especially considered that the intel macs have been around +/- 8 years

To the Op, I guess that a lot of OEMs will hit the market now.

I hate oem crap and a flood of it will just make it worse, I like servers and real workstations as they often have high end parts but most of the good custom builds are gone. Last thing I want to run into is a roach motel or a rig full of tobacco tar.

sliderider wrote:

I don't foresee very much new hardware being made available due to the cutoff of XP support. It's not like in the Mac community where each new version of OS X only supports a very narrow selection of machines which immediately renders dozens of machines that were supported in the previous version obsolete overnight causing people to dump them before they depreciate too much. The hardware supported by each version of Windows is very broad so old machines can be used longer. Machines on the trailing edge of support have probably reached maximum depreciation already so there's no urgent need to dump them before you lose too much money.

Well i guess that there are still a lot of workplaces still using a lot of XP machines (hospitals, banks, stores etc) and i supose thay if they are to get a newer OS than they'd rather get newer machines. In other words that's what their technicians will conveniently advise them to do.

As all of you said it will be a flood of OEMs instead. Probably making real oldschool hardware even more rare and expensive.

As far as a "big wave" - I doubt it; IME most big organizations buy their hardware on rotation, so they've generally gone through a few generations of Windows XP equipped machines, and have switched (or will switch/are switching) to whatever new OS they like on the next rotation. Internal re-imaging to a new OS may occur as well, if the machines are up to spec and still functional, and if it's cheaper based on whatever licensing agreement they have with MSFT.

I think the kinds of machines that do appear though will be the "mostly integrated and cheap" sorts of P4 and Athlon64 clients that you'd find in places like schools, hospitals, etc. Gutting the CPUs and memory out of them may be worthwhile (but most of that stuff is already dirt cheap and there are salvagers that make a living chopping that stuff and selling the individual parts - so you spend a fwe bucks and get the single part you want, versus tens of dollars to do it yourself), but the other components are usually worthless (think proprietary form factor motherboards with minimal expansion capabilities, non-standard wired low capacity PSUs, hard-drives with way too many runtime hours, etc). These kinds of machines have already been appearing en masse for years on the used market.

As far as pre-1GHz (like Pentium 3 and older) hardware, remember that in the 1990s computer ownership wasn't anywhere approaching universal, so the stuff doesn't have the numbers like Pentium 4 does. The personally owned machines are probably what you're still finding as "residuals" these days (you know, garage finds, estate sales, that kind of thing) - the "fleet" machines have, for the most part, all cycled through a rotation and gone through the salvage/recycle system. Scarcity of "real oldschool hardware" (like say, a Voodoo5 AGP card) drives the pricing, but as far as I'm aware that stuff is completely unaffected by the ocean of Pentium 4 based Optiplex towers that've been flooding the market for years.