Mind you I have yet to have a PC on which I can play Stalker. Why? I don’t know.”

That sounds a bit like there’s something not quite right with your PC – both World in Conflict and Stalker ran perfectly fine on my old single-core Athlon with a 7600 GT, and I’ve even played Stalker (without dynamic lighting, though), on an Athlon 2400 with an Nvidia 5xxx card. Hohum. :)

Weak PSU causing your graphics card to throttle down, maybe?

You can’t really claim there was a massive increase in memory and dual cores among users when the current sample set is less than 2% of the previous sample set.

It seems likely that the first responses to the survey would be the hardcore gamers who have Steam on all the time and therefore the people more likely to have high end systems. You really shouldn’t be making conclusions on the results until we get up around 100,000 samples.

Nice dubious reporting there.

I completely switched to using a Laptop a year ago, when I bought my current machine, and don’t even own a Desktop PC anymore. Some people I know did the same, because a laptop is just more practical, especially when you are a CS student. However, most laptops just don’t have the raw power of their desktop conterparts of course, and I hope many of the games to come out soon will still be playable by people like me (with lower settings of course), since I don’t want to buy a new notebook every year.

The main problem with my setup, and I think that’s true for many notebooks, is not graphics (GeForce Go 7600), but CPU power (Core2Duo at 1.60Ghz). Looking at Valve’s survey, this the one point where my machine is far behind. And in most games I know, you can turn down the graphics a lot, but there are few options that would reduce required CPU power.

Also, for the RAM anomaly, I think memory prices dropped a lot in the last months. Even I have installed 2GiB now because it was so dang cheap.