At the Windows 2000 Conference and Expo which coincided with the operating system’s launch, I paid a visit to the emulators.com booth, where they were excitedly showing off SoftMac 2000, a Mac emulator that ran on Windows 2000. Emulator trivia: MacOS booted in five seconds under Windows 2000, which was faster than the real Mac, because the emulator simulated a 1GB Mac so the Mac memory manager never had to do any paging. Now, the host computer didn’t have 1GB of real RAM, so the host computer was still paging, but it turns out that you’re better off letting the Windows 2000 kernel do the paging than the copy of MacOS running inside the emulator. Anyway, Darek Mihocka, the proprietor of emulators.com, has started posting his thoughts on Intel’s new Core 2, and given the promo titles of his upcoming entries, it looks like he’s going to start digging into running Vista on his Mac Pro.

But all of this yammering about emulation is just a sideshow to the real issue: The picture of the hardware that Darek’s retiring. I mean, look at it. He’s retiring more computers than I own! I bet he’s one of those people who relocates his computers during the winter in order to use them as space heaters.