On 11/24/09, Fred Cisin <cisin at xenosoft.com> wrote: Guideline, not threshold. There are countless exceptions on both sides. Guideline, not threshold. Indeed. The results of one of the many recurrent discussions of "The 10 Year Rule" is that it really comes down to "interesting machines are in, mainstream machines are out". The list of what falls in and what is still out, changes from year to year, but a rule of thumb is that there are plenty of places to go to ask for help fixing your Windows PC, and this is not the place for it. At one time, when MS-DOS was still in common use all over the planet, this was not the place to talk about those sorts of machines. I would suggest that now, DOS knowledge has become esoteric (the slide starting with the release of Windows 95, one could argue), and that discussion of boxes running MS-DOS could be on-topic. I would still suggest that Windows 98 and newer are quite off-topic and will be for a large number of years into the future (meaning greater-than-the-quantity-10). Windows 95 is kinda on the fence to me since there's a disconnect with Win98-and-later. Practically speaking, if you are fiddling with Windows 95 at this point, it's because you want to experience how things were 14 years ago. Windows 98, though, I would argue, is new enough that it's still a "modern" experience. If you wanted to discuss the Pentium FDIV bug and which chips were affected, I'd think that was on-topic. If you wanted to discuss what Windows drivers are needed for that very same machine, I'd say that's off-topic. Same hardware, different sides of the line. "Ten Years" isn't (and hasn't been for a while) the be-all-end-all criterion. -ethan