Between 2000 and 2010, computers should have gotten about 100 times faster (assuming speed increases by 2^(10/1.5) - yeah I know that's not really Moore's law,

Between 2000 and 2010, computers should have gotten about 100 times faster (assuming speed increases by 2^(10/1.5) - yeah I know that's not really Moore's law, but let's assume it's almost reasonable). Your server class SS20 was about 5 years ahead of commodity boxes. This was the days when servers (or workstations) were much faster than consumer boxes. A computer these days will spend most of it's time at 1-5%. That's with a heavyweight OS, multiple applications open, and modern applications (which are not built to be frugal). So, while your computer would be almost capable of running a modern workload. It would hang, now and then, if you tried compiling or running a badly written flash app, but otherwise would be fine. Most of the last 15 years of performance gains have allowed consumer computers to catch up with workstations, made occasional tasks (like importing documents, and compiling small programs) almost instantaneous (rather than annoyingly slow), and allowed programmers to fill up the screen with eye candy.