We are pretty lucky in that 98% of our clientele are energy companies that can afford to upgrade every so often. The bulk of our users are field technicians that carry laptops in the field or outlying offices and get a new one every 3 years or so. The rest are desktop users or file servers. The hardware you describe might reflect 2-5% of our users. We used strictly VFP in all older versions and the only drawback to a slow machine was speed of the application ( we have numerous grids ). Database operations were okay except for the joined intensive queries made on larger tables.

We run a pretty fat client and have seen slow down in testing in the front/middle to back-end communication ( moved from VFP to SQL Server ), but have not moved forward enough to see any front-end hits. We are on hold on the .NET stuff while we debug our last VFP beta version before we move forward again.

We were testing true VC++ grids, when we thought we were dropping VFP for VC++, and they were a lot faster than the VFP grids, but the .NET version has not been run through our ropes yet. That is coming next month. We are still hoping for Dundas Software to migrate their VC++ grid over to .NET.

We are looking at using mostly C# and limited managed/unmanaged C++ along with SQL Server and Personal SQL for the detached users. We are avoiding VB. MSDE just doesn't have the muscle for our database's size.

We have to have our proof of concept done toward the end of August. So far it is a mixed bag.