Once again "updating for the sake of updating" applies, sure there some genuine new stuff that offer something that is not just a fresh paint job. But can the same be said for the SERVER environment.

Since you mentioned mickysoft, allot of people are still running NT3.5 & NT4 on there OLD pentium platforms, as a server, and in same cases as a work station, and shock horror mickysoft still support them.

I agree with Craig that perhaps you should start getting used to the fact that they are "Microsoft". Also, Microsoft haven't supported NT3.51 for quite a while, they basically have stopped supporting NT 4.0 December last year, and they are about to stop providing security patches very shortly AFAIK.

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People buy new PC's because they want something which their old PC didn't give them - the ability to do some new task (like play games, or support larger hard drives/more drives/more ram, etc), or some existing task faster than what they had. Or just because their old PC is broken. They throw old PC's away, or off the roof at parties, or deal to them with a sledgehammer.

That's life in the technology world, get used to it. People do that with cars too you know.

Well, it is true for the end user, but I was talking about servers...

And yes, putting a server you paid $8,000+ for 3-4 years ago in the bin is a bit stupid, just beacuse the "latest and greatest" OS that does the same as what you have all ready got will not run on it....

An $ 8,000 server 3-4 years ago would have at least been a 800-1000 MHz PIII, possibly a Dual processor machine, depending on buying power. In the enterprise world, that is not a big deal at all, the ROI would have been well within 3 years. Normally, servers come with a 3 year warranty/service contract and in the enterprise environment in many instances the cost of having the server down for any length of time can outweigh the cost of the server itself, hence High Availability and Redundancy is a very important consideration. If the machine is out of warranty and/or is not on service contract, then in a lot of incidences, it shouldn't be in production. In other environments where things are not so crucial, I would expect a life of 5-7 years for a server. Quite often in the enterprise environment, 3-4 year old servers are used in test environments where if the server bellies up and/or spits out a hard drive, then so what ? So you'll be pleased to know that 3-4 year servers don't go straight in the bin.