In a few short weeks, buyers will get their first glimpse of this holiday season's PCs. By most any measure, it's an exceptional vintage of sleek, ultra-thin laptops running Windows 8. Indeed, the upcoming models represent the biggest leap over the prior year's harvest than we've seen in a long time-maybe ever.
So if you set aside all the other variables that sway how consumers apportion their electronics budgets, you'd expect PC sales to swell this quarter. That's what happened three years ago, when Microsoft replaced a dreadful OS, Windows Vista, with Windows 7. PC sales grew 22.1 percent that quarter, sharply higher than the 0.5 percent growth logged in the prior period, according to Gartner data.
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