Quote from Maverickz:
Second while it is true that every OS that has ever come out did indeed have a larger memory footprint than it's predecessor none had the giant leap in memory consumption that Vista has over XP. Like the previous poster mentioned you need double the ram to run Vista over XP and what do you gain?
minimum requirements for win98/ME was 16MB with 24 Recommended.
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/182751
Most will agree that back then, 64MB was "smooth sailing" and 128 was only for "power users".
With XP, the minimum requirements were 64MB with 128 Recommended
http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/pro/evaluation/sysreqs.mspx ... although most everyone would agree that running on less than 1GB was shaky....
Jumping to Vista, now minimumis 512 and 1GB recomended...
http://www.microsoft.com/windows/products/windowsvista/editions/systemrequirements.mspx ...2GB is recommended by almost all hardware vendors...
While according to microsoft's numbers:
Win98-WinXP - 4x at minimum specs, 5x with recommended
WinXP - Vista - 8x at minimum specs, 8x recomended
but if you look at what hardware vendors have been saying all along, what you should have been runnin on the old OS is now minimum for the new OS in both cases
Lets not forget the cost of RAM. Today, 1GB of RAM is about 1/3rd the cost that 32MB was when Win98 was released.
IMO, with the cost of RAM so rediculously cheap these days, there is no reason whatsoever that someone shouldn't be running a minimum of 4GB no matter what OS they are running (or at least the max your Mobo will support if it doesn't support 4GB)....which makes this a mute argument....RAM should NEVER be a decision when buying a new PC....always max it out.
And just for comparison....
MacOS9 - 32MB of ram (I couldn't find anything earlier than OS9)
MacOSX - 512MB of ram
Holy jump in system requirements batman...
Now, if we look at stability....
Win95 blew donkey nuts for stability when it was first released. It took 4 releases before microsoft finally "got it right".
Win98 blew donkey nuts for stability when it was first released. It took a Second release before it was "stable".
XP (guess what it did?....yep) blew donkey nuts for stability when it was released. in fact, it sucked so bad, MANY people didn't make the switch from 98 until after sp2....not 1 but 2 service packs it took before people would accept that the new features were worth the upgrade...
And lastly, lets look at compatability...
Win95-Win98 - very few hardware compatability problems. This of course was simply because it is the exact same OS, just repackaged.
Win98-WinXP - Tons of hardware AND software compatability problems. This was because it was actually a new OS.
WinXP-Vista - Hardware problems experienced once again...once again, this is a new OS...
And just for comparison...MacOS9 - MacOSX...so completely incompatable that Apple bundled them together to get people to switch under the guise of being able to switch back and forth...
Basicly....People have become spoiled....quit complaining and suck it up....this is the way of computers...nothing has changed....nothing will change....sure Vista isn't the answers to all your prayers...and SP1 is equivilant to the SP1 of XP (it just fixed the bugs that should hve been fixed at launch)...
Vista IS the future of Home/Office computing OS at this point.
The only real question at this point is if Vista will become the new ME (where MS scraps it's progress and rebuilds from the core) or if it will become the new XP where 2 years from now everyone will forget that Vista, pre-spX, even exists.