Look back 2 deades at the machine you would have bought
then and tell me you'd still be using one of those
today. Give me a break. You couldn't be using the
internet with one of those things they way you do.
Look forward to advances and growth similar to those
we've experienced in the recent past.
Best guess is that while line conditioning would save you
from some of the failure modes ordinary commercial equipment
you bought won't last two decades. Of 7 machines on a LAN
I use sometimes two motherboards failed between 4 and 5
years of age. Both intermittently failed to recognize a
peripheral (one the keyboard, the other the mouse.) An
identical machine used in a residential setting had the
USB port and the integrated sound card fail just after
3 years. (These were all barebones systems purchased from
www.krex.com at their store which is nearby.)
Obviously everyone's mileage varies. I have ~10 computers
here, and I typically lose 1 to 1.5 motherboards each year
despite power conditioning.
Motherboards are inexpensively made these days. CPU's run
quite hot with lots of cooling. If nothing else, fan failures
slip up on people when least expected. Computers have become
just another disposable.
It was about 2 decades ago that I bought an 80286 motherboard
with a 10 MHz processor overclocked to 12, and no ram or
anything else with it, for the basement bargain price of $285.
For about the same price in devalued dollars I can buy a 2.6GHz
CPU, motherboard, and 512 megs of ram across the counter at
MicroCenter, and that sucker has a lot of stuff built into it.
Today I have no use for the 80 meg MFM harddrive that cost me
in excess of $700 a decade + back. By today's standards
is is small and slow (82 microseconds track to track seek time
but it did interleave 1:1, hot stuff back ten.)
1984 cars aren't real popular here either.