Literally penned up in chain-link enclosures, harried teams of hardware hackers labored to produce a working PC from a collection of components during the WinHEC Wars competition at WinHEC last month.
As PCs increasingly come to market as sealed-box appliances, the WinHEC Wars, which were held in Anaheim, Calif., reminded IT buyers that the open PC platform is a Darwinian jungle where every manner of subsystem vendor continually seeks a price/ performance edge.
The elevated hardware requirements of Windows XP, although in some ways merely catching up to the Macintosh, will stimulate the next stage in that evolution.