Microsoft Announces System Requirements for Vista

15 gig's of Hd space for install

Windows cant be a virus, a virus does not have 15 gig's of useless dll files

http://www.microsoft.com/windowsvist...y/capable.mspx

[blwells45]

Wow. that's all I have to say. Wow.

[JCardwell]

Can anyone say "Software Bloat". guess they feel if there's space use it..

[wjferguson]

Technically, they are only saying you need that free 15GB for the install. They could delete some of those "useless DLLs" once the installation is complete.

Hope springs eternal!

Bill

Originally Posted by wjferguson

Technically, they are only saying you need that free 15GB for the install. They could delete some of those "useless DLLs" once the installation is complete.

Hope springs eternal!

Bill

my point is that microsoft is improving their "os" by not leaning it down, but by bloating it, the more lines of code, the more your processor and related systems have to crunch hence slowing it down, my XP install is 2 gig's 5 gig's if i use my slipstream dvd for all my software and such which i use, Vista is gonna be 10-15 gig's this is an increase of size 5 to 7-8 times, which will force users to upgrade their hard drives, and memory requirements, and everything else last i checked this is illegal

my understanding of the inner workings of windows can fill a thimble and have room left over, but i excel at hardware so a few notes i have encountered

once a dll file is installed, it generally wont be deleted upon uninstall of the software you used unless your asked by the software implicitly when uninstalling, this also includes vb files, ocx files and vxd files, which the latter 3 will never be removed during the uninstall process so that adds to the bloat

if you have a card in your machine, but no driver installed, windows will "mark" the pci card as installed even if you did not install the driver, it uses a generic driver to hold it in place, and may mess with your system, i had this issue with my wireless card and nic card last week, i did my spring cleaning, formatted and reinstalled i did not bother with the wireless card drivers as i have no need for it right now, but it was "installed" by XP and was actually assigning an ip address to my gigabit card my, buddies and i have no idea why it was doing this

all drivers are NOT removed on uninstall of hardware it throws them into a database and holds a copy for future use, how useless is that?? if i upgrade from company A's video card to company B's i should be able to remove the 100 megs from card A's usage but it does not happen that way, it has to be manually rooted out and deleted

Blessings

[voyager529]

Originally Posted by Vista Page (Emphasis Added)

A Windows Vista Premium Ready PC includes at least:

• 1 GHz 32-bit (x86) or 64-bit (x64) processor¹.
• 1 GB of system memory.
• A graphics processor that runs Windows Aero².
• 128 MB of graphics memory.
• 40 GB of hard drive capacity with 15 GB free space.
• DVD-ROM Drive³.
• Audio output capability.
• Internet access capability.

You don't NEED 15Gigs. They're stating that if you buy a PC that bears the "Vista Premium" logo, it will have a 40 gig drive, 15 of which must be blank when they ship it. In other words, between Vista and bundles software, the total amount of space taken by preinstalled programs and Vista itself cannot go over 25GB (40 drive total-15 free space requirement). Vista does NOT take up 15GB, nor do you need 15GB for installation. I installed Vista Ultimate (beta) on my laptop, for which I carved out a 6GB partition. It installed flawlessly and had 1.93GB left over. So yeah, Vista Ultimate takes a little more than 4GB (at least Beta 2 build 5309 does), and I had enough room for Nero, Firefox, drivers, and a few other toys. I will def say that 1GB of RAM is a must...as is a decent GPU (they offer "Windows Classic Mode" for users with [gulp!]Integrated graphics).

Any questions about Vista, PM me and I'll be happy to answer them best I can!


Joey

[[Admin] PHugger]

Originally Posted by Gzsrulz

all drivers are NOT removed on uninstall of hardware it throws them into a database and holds a copy for future use, how useless is that?? if i upgrade from company A's video card to company B's i should be able to remove the 100 megs from card A's usage but it does not happen that way, it has to be manually rooted out and deleted

There are many good reasons for this. I would never want the removal of hardware to trigger the deletion of drivers. That would render most laptops and a lot of desktop machines useless. Some of your other compaints sound like features - you installed a card without drivers and somehow Windows made it work. It's hard to install drivers when your screen is blank.

I've never heard of a database for storing unused drivers. You can easily find out where any particular driver is and there is an uninstall function (deleting the files is manual). Don't most drivers and programs come with an uninstall applet? The windows registry has it's shortcoming, but it's so much better than it was before and a huge improvement over the mess that the old Mac OS had. Unix and it's variants have taken the approach of creating individual configuration files for every application and system functions. I think both approaches could use some improvement.

Disk space is cheap these day. Try to find a 40gb drive (3.5" for a desktop). If you find one I bet it's old. I'm not sure too many people are going to complain about that (there will be plenty of other things). If there are too many problems, people will just stay with XP or 2K. Wow, 3 generations of windows still in use........ (c8

Thanks for the straight scoop voyager!




PCH

Originally Posted by voyager529

You don't NEED 15Gigs. They're stating that if you buy a PC that bears the "Vista Premium" logo, it will have a 40 gig drive, 15 of which must be blank when they ship it. In other words, between Vista and bundles software, the total amount of space taken by preinstalled programs and Vista itself cannot go over 25GB (40 drive total-15 free space requirement). Vista does NOT take up 15GB, nor do you need 15GB for installation. I installed Vista Ultimate (beta) on my laptop, for which I carved out a 6GB partition. It installed flawlessly and had 1.93GB left over. So yeah, Vista Ultimate takes a little more than 4GB (at least Beta 2 build 5309 does), and I had enough room for Nero, Firefox, drivers, and a few other toys. I will def say that 1GB of RAM is a must...as is a decent GPU (they offer "Windows Classic Mode" for users with [gulp!]Integrated graphics).

Any questions about Vista, PM me and I'll be happy to answer them best I can!


Joey

ok i am gonna cover a lot here, i have an earache so i hope this is all understandable and cohesive forgive the long winded post

to respond to your statement Joey about its size, it will eventually get there or close it is the microsoft way, but we wont exactly know till it comes out now ill we

the version i have at the shop, i dont know the build number, is 3 weeks old, and takes 9 gig's for the base install of just windows and SQL, sorry thats wayyy too much

are you sure your installing everything vista has to offer?? (not saying you did not, you seem to know computing very well)

Vista queries your system, then installs what it thinks is the optimised install for your particular machine, we installed everything so i would guess yes it will hit 10-12gb eventually, heck IE 7 takes 190Mb, Ms Office 03 SBE full install is 655mb soooo microsoft has a long history of bloat, thats the point i am getting at Bloat, Bloat, and more Bloat, i read Vista has 18 million lines of code thats 10 million more than XP Pro

as an example my UBUNTU install on my dell Inspiron 650 with win98 in WINE is less than 250mb total, thats a fresh install, i have a 60gb hitatchi travelstar in it and have a ton of software on it plus 2 gig's of ram and a 64mb GF4 card

most notebooks today, sub 1200 bucks do not meet the minimum requirements of vista, the video sub system is a premium, i have a kinda broke alienware here 2 years old, that has a 128mb ati 9800 pro mobile in it it barely plays world of warcraft with 2 gig's of ram

but i will expect Vista to run on a gaming class machine, and another major concern is that computer builders with charge a premium to be Vista Premium, i find that disturbing

as for its looking glass full on 3d desktop, is going to be a beast on most machines, i am not saying your machine is sub standard, you did not state its specs so i am shooting blind here, i am wondering if Vista found something and installed less than full install at that point, which if you dont pay attention, you will float over it, Microsoft has stated they want limited or no user interaction upon install

i tried to install it on my dual amd 3000 and it puked, i have not really played with it yet, it is currently residing on a system in the broadband headend it is an amd 64 FX52 with 2 gigs of ram, and dual 74gb raptors, and still its sluggish to me, beautiful interface but beauty is only skin deep

my concern is Microsoft forces people to upgrade their hardware to run everything they have, it took me 2 years to go from Win2K AS to XP Pro i was not wholly convinced, today i am very glad i did make the move, it has been extremely good to me

if i may ask Joey, whats your thoughts overall of Vista, i would like to hear a non secular viewpoint on it, the church will be upgrading hardware next year and i wonder if it is worth it, and as i have stated your very good about your understanding of software, i am excellent at hardware not software, Tim my partner, is all software not hardware, and is clueless about how radiowaves propagate

Tim and i are Co Owners of a WISP and a very large computer repair shop which has been around in the same building since 1992, i own the WISP and internet cafe, we use 3 bonded oc3's (43Mb Digital in and out Each) with 2 t1's (1.5/1.5Mb) and 4 business class DSL (1.5Mb down/740k up) as failover running through a cisco catalyst 2600 with gigabit fiber uplinks, Tim owns the backbone in the area, so we dont pay anything for the oc/t lines

his thoughts are less than encouraging on vista, same as mine, total bloat i am probably gonna stick with With win03 Server on the NAS we are building for the church

our headend runs on heavily modified Debain off Simon Lok's LokBox (version 850 you cant even get them to admit it is around) and asterisk Server (for VOIP) runs on cent os, both are linux

Linux is gaining speed

Lok Technology
http://www.loktechnology.com/

Redhat
http://www.redhat.com

Asterisk VOIP Server
http://www.asterisk.org/

Cent OS
http://www.centos.org/

Originally Posted by PHugger

There are many good reasons for this. I would never want the removal of hardware to trigger the deletion of drivers. That would render most laptops and a lot of desktop machines useless. Some of your other compaints sound like features - you installed a card without drivers and somehow Windows made it work. It's hard to install drivers when your screen is blank.

I've never heard of a database for storing unused drivers. You can easily find out where any particular driver is and there is an uninstall function (deleting the files is manual). Don't most drivers and programs come with an uninstall applet? The windows registry has it's shortcoming, but it's so much better than it was before and a huge improvement over the mess that the old Mac OS had. Unix and it's variants have taken the approach of creating individual configuration files for every application and system functions. I think both approaches could use some improvement.

Disk space is cheap these day. Try to find a 40gb drive (3.5" for a desktop). If you find one I bet it's old. I'm not sure too many people are going to complain about that (there will be plenty of other things). If there are too many problems, people will just stay with XP or 2K. Wow, 3 generations of windows still in use........ (c8

Thanks for the straight scoop voyager!




PCH

Originally Posted by PHugger

There are many good reasons for this. I would never want the removal of hardware to trigger the deletion of drivers. That would render most laptops and a lot of desktop machines useless. Some of your other compaints sound like features - you installed a card without drivers and somehow Windows made it work. It's hard to install drivers when your screen is blank.

i agree for the most part, i was clarifying that they stick around, and video cards windows will install a default Vesa driver to get you to install the regular driver, they are noit complaints just observations

Originally Posted by PHugger

I've never heard of a database for storing unused drivers. You can easily find out where any particular driver is and there is an uninstall function (deleting the files is manual). Don't most drivers and programs come with an uninstall applet?

stick a device in, and choose install driver (i have a disk option) and there is the database or you may not need a driver, it is already there, or you may search the database if you dont have a driver to choose

most applets dont remove the drivers, it *MAY* uninstall registry keys, some days it will delete the folder lol, the registry has gotten better, but also it is windows shortcoming, too much stuff gets stuck in there and your computer will be sluggish, as most uninstalls wont remove their keys upon install especially if you have a registration key, and also it is where most virus's land to get botted up amongst other things

Originally Posted by PHugger

Disk space is cheap these day. Try to find a 40gb drive (3.5" for a desktop). If you find one I bet it's old. I'm not sure too many people are going to complain about that (there will be plenty of other things). If there are too many problems, people will just stay with XP or 2K. Wow, 3 generations of windows still in use........ (c8

disk space is the cheapest it ever has been, but i have a box of 12 brand new 40 gig seagate drives, i paid 20 bucks for each one off ebay, i use them for raid 0+1 striping for rendering, i have found they are extremly reliable in my personal usage, a buddy runs winNT4.0 Server thats from 1996 and runs strong as an ox, i actually switched to it in 97 and been happy with professional end of microsoft

Originally Posted by PHugger

Thanks for the straight scoop voyager!

i would not call it "stright" scoop just because someone installs it, does not make them an instant brain about that software or anything for that matter

i have a copy myself from my MSDN subscription (only legal way to get it) if i want the no bones about the OS i can make a call to an engineer at microsoft, and find out more

he unfortunatly is not a christian, my MSDN Engineer assigned to my account, so it is hard to speak to him from a non-secular standpoint i want to know more about it and i have no time to dink with our install at the shop

hopefully this does not turn into a slam fest, i just pointed out a particular issue with the new OS and it seems a few have it out for certain people and rip them up, and their particular viewpoints (had a few in PM already and feel this is uncalled for)

windows will always be bloated without fail, just look at their track record of new os's they essentially double the size or more with the exception of winMe it was win98 with window dressing

[voyager529]

Originally Posted by Gzsrulz

to respond to your statement Joey about its size, it will eventually get there or close it is the microsoft way, but we wont exactly know till it comes out now ill we

If it does, that means that over the next six months they'll be doubling the amount of stuff that went into my computer this time around.

are you sure your installing everything vista has to offer?? (not saying you did not, you seem to know computing very well)

Vista didn't give me installation options - as in they didn't give me a list of components to choose or not choose. I do know that I got the system files (obviously), all the accessories (themes, calculator, the games, etc.), as well at the Media Center stuff and MMC. If I didn't get something, i'm unaware of it...

Vista queries your system, then installs what it thinks is the optimised install for your particular machine, we installed everything so i would guess yes it will hit 10-12gb eventually, heck IE 7 takes 190Mb, Ms Office 03 SBE full install is 655mb soooo microsoft has a long history of bloat, thats the point i am getting at Bloat, Bloat, and more Bloat, i read Vista has 18 million lines of code thats 10 million more than XP Pro

how can IE7 be 190MB in itself? The installer for XP is only 12...that's some heavy duty compression...but as a part of the OS it could theoretically be possible...but it could somewhate be justified based on it's weight and usage in the OS. A Mack truck takes up more space on the highway than a pickup, but it also carries alot more cargo.

as an example my UBUNTU install on my dell Inspiron 650 with win98 in WINE i
s less than 250mb total, thats a fresh install, i have a 60gb hitatchi travelstar in it and have a ton of software on it plus 2 gig's of ram and a 64mb GF4 card

Linux has always been good about maximizing every line of code, but there's a paradigm difference between Windows and Linux - Windows is a commerical product, while Linux is a community effort. Windows has tighter deadlines (well, sorta ) because the life of Microsoft depends on it. Linux will survive whether it takes a week or a month to develop a specific module.

as for its looking glass full on 3d desktop, is going to be a beast on most machines, i am not saying your machine is sub standard, you did not state its specs so i am shooting blind here, i am wondering if Vista found something and installed less than full install at that point, which if you dont pay attention, you will float over it, Microsoft has stated they want limited or no user interaction upon install

Specs:
3.2GHz P4/HT
1GB RAM
80GB Hdd (6GB for its partition - I'm upping that to 10 this time)
nVidia Geforce 5600 Go with 128MB dedicated video RAM

As far as I know that made muster for the Glass FX and live icons, but the 3d desktop thing I think I might've fallen short on - not on account of the system per se but I didn't have that special driver (WDDM?) for full-on Aero FX.

if i may ask Joey, whats your thoughts overall of Vista, i would like to hear a non secular viewpoint on it, the church will be upgrading hardware next year and i wonder if it is worth it, and as i have stated your very good about your understanding of software.

I appreciate the compliment (PTL for my understanding!). My thoughts on Vista are this - grab A copy to work on and get used to, but don't use it in a production or presentation environment, at least for now. In fact I think it could be one of the worst things a church could do would be to upgrade the Presentation comptuer to Vista before the volunteers get used to the new workflow (think 98/ME-->XP). If your volunteers are anything like ours, it'll cause plenty of chaos amongst the ranks. Thing is, while Vista does have some nice new features in addition to its facelift, I haven't seen anything relevant to presenting. And that's why I say hold off for now. At the same time, something tells me that Mediashout 4/SSP8/EZW'08 will require Vista (DirectX 10, etc.), but for now I don't see a reason for churches to upgrade, especially the PC video production people - there's nothing like having 450MB of your 1GB of RAM dedicated to your OS instead of Premiere/Vegas/Pinnacle...you'll find yourself in Virtual Memory really fast (in Vista's defense, XP MCE takes up about 300 on my laptop). Given time, we'll all end up on Vista, solely on account of it coming with our brand spankin' new 10GHz dual-core/8GB RAM/1TB/Geforce 9999/2GB video RAM towers we'll all have in 3-4 years...but for now, i don't see Microsoft reaching their goal of creating as much fanfare about Vista as they did about '95...especially on the account of the church community.


Joey

[blwells45]

Originally Posted by voyager529

but for now, i don't see Microsoft reaching their goal of creating as much fanfare about Vista as they did about '95...
Joey

I totally agree. The jump from 3.1 to '95 was immense. I don't see that from XP --> Vista. People WANTED to move from 3.1 to '95. I would say that average Joe user is probably happy with XP and will make the move to Vista when their current machine bites it. I would say that will probably be true of most churches as well. They'll stick with the OS that they have on their current computer and will move when they buy a new machine.

how can IE7 be 190MB in itself? The installer for XP is only 12...that's some heavy duty compression...but as a part of the OS it could theoretically be possible...but it could somewhate be justified based on it's weight and usage in the OS. A Mack truck takes up more space on the highway than a pickup, but it also carries alot more cargo.

i was not clear, after IE7 after it is said and done after compressions and downloads from the net it will end up being that size, remember XP fits on a singluar cd, when it installs and uncompresses it is 1.5gb on average after all is done, my concern is that Microsoft generally hits their minimum requirements over time, as an example my windows folder on this machine, the Audio NLE at church has 20,650 files 1,518 folders and occupies 2.82Gb of space this is unacceptable as i need every bit of realestate i can get, 2 gig's is a full hour and a half of stereo audio in the format i use

I appreciate the compliment (PTL for my understanding!). My thoughts on Vista are this - grab A copy to work on and get used to, but don't use it in a production or presentation environment, at least for now. In fact I think it could be one of the worst things a church could do would be to upgrade the Presentation comptuer to Vista before the volunteers get used to the new workflow (think 98/ME-->XP). If your volunteers are anything like ours, it'll cause plenty of chaos amongst the ranks. Thing is, while Vista does have some nice new features in addition to its facelift, I haven't seen anything relevant to presenting. And that's why I say hold off for now. At the same time, something tells me that Mediashout 4/SSP8/EZW'08 will require Vista (DirectX 10, etc.), but for now I don't see a reason for churches to upgrade, especially the PC video production people - there's nothing like having 450MB of your 1GB of RAM dedicated to your OS instead of Premiere/Vegas/Pinnacle...you'll find yourself in Virtual Memory really fast (in Vista's defense, XP MCE takes up about 300 on my laptop). Given time, we'll all end up on Vista, solely on account of it coming with our brand spankin' new 10GHz dual-core/8GB RAM/1TB/Geforce 9999/2GB video RAM towers we'll all have in 3-4 years...but for now, i don't see Microsoft reaching their goal of creating as much fanfare about Vista as they did about '95...especially on the account of the church community.

your welcome, young and knowledgeable are generally not common and this is what i was wanting, and afraid of at this point, our vol staff is resistant to change as is atypical of most vol staff, i cant wait for 10Gig towers Baby!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

yeah Aero (not looking glass my bad) is great but as with most microsoft products it is "Window Dressing" how does it work internally is my concern we depend on our rigs at church and home for some of us, is it stable?? will it not be after patches??, will it be easy to use for ppl that dont know how to use it?? basic things like that

Blessings

[Tony Kanago]

How about this..

When I installed Vista Beta 2, (which was the pre-release of Ultimate,) it ran fine on this system:

Celeron 2.5ghz
1024mb DDR400 RAM
40gb ATA/133 drive
PCI Radeon 7000 graphics

The biggest issue was getting drivers put together which wasn't much of an issue. It didn't actually use more than 6gb for the install itself. Things just worked. Aero was alright, but my GPU obviously didn't enjoy it so I kept it off.

How do you suppose it runs now on a-

AMD Athlon X2 3800+ running at 2800mhz
1024+512mb Corsair DDR400 ram
160gb SATA 3gbps Drive
PCI-x 16x eVGA 7600GT
nForce 4 SLI

That computer cost considerably less than what I see most worship-production grade machines going for, and Vista without Aero runs -faster- than XP, and with Aero, not much slower at all.

As far as Vista being bloated:
Vista is actually -less- bloated than XP codewise for the most part. More code was rewritten more efficiently.That's the main reason why the release date was pushed back so far. Kernel code optimized, TCP/IP rewritten back to OpenBSD standards; things are just cleaner. Obviously features have been added which do slow things down, but it's not even comparable. I don't really believe counting lines of code is important, considering my dad is a software engineer and he can tell you just how much 18 million lines of code is, (aka, not quite as many as you think.) Just to make that 18 million number seem a little more reasonable.. When you think of the total number going into the operating system, there are plenty of factors to consider. The number includes the kernel, the visual desktop system, library files, drivers, and bundled applications. The kernel itself, I guarentee you, is not 18 million lines long. Of course, it's more than any, even monolithic, Linux kernel could be, but it's not quite as unreasonable as the media may make it seem. Take for example the CRL system and .NET 2 framework. Managed code is arguably one of the best ideas for desktop systems ever thunk in computing. There are plenty of reasons for and against it, but in the end it can make a large impact on development. The whole system making up that framework could in the end be more than twice the size of the application using it, but by no means does that mean that application runs more slowly.

Windows is a bloated operating system, yes, but in comparsion to what? Linux? When I have my way, I run server kernels that can fit on half of a floppy. The BIOS chip itself could store that much data. Windows is a different type of operating system entirely. Unix-based systems are geared for a different type of processing. Small applications working together to make things go. Is that necessarily better? Considering Windows benchmarks aren't far behind Unix's, I'd probably say no. I prefer it, but I wouldn't say it's much better in any field of performance. Windows, being this different style, simply holds its instructions different, in larger blocks of code. Does this necessarily mean more bloating? No, it only means it's stored differently.

Does accessing one larger kernel take any longer than accessing a smaller kernel along with a few hundred smaller kernel modules? Not so definitively. It relies entirely on specifics of the machine and application.

Windows is progressing in a route that makes ease of use and development a high priority. Bad? Certainly not! It just has it's consequences, which we have all seen to be higher hardware costs.

Vista for Worship?
At this moment, I feel that if I was buying a new computer for our church video position, (operating system choice aside,) I would favor that costs roughly $2500, self-built for lower costs, better performance, and more room for upgrade. That machine would be able to handle Vista, easy as that, without being designed for it. I would probably install Vista Premium or Ultimate it if the timing was right for a number of reasons. For one, I would run it the same way I run XP- strip out absolutely everything unnecessary. Especially in a Worship scenario, why run Aero? All the hardware is new, so there would be no driver confusion issues. Sure, it'd be a bit of a risk using practically trunk-level software on a production computer, but there is a risk vs. reward factor. Even on Beta builds, I've found Vista far more stable than XP on both sets of hardware I've used. Vista ran smoother with effects turned to the same level as XP. Sure, it took me a while to get Vista how I wanted, but the other day I reinstalled XP on my own desktop and it took me even longer to turn the things I chose off; that was already knowing where things were!

For most people, I'd recommend waiting, but not long if they have the hardware for it. A year, at most, is when I'd say the right time to go would be.


Just so you know where I'm coming from:
I'm a Linux guy. I prefer Linux to Windows. I choose to run a Windows desktop only to cut back on time spent configuring CrossOver Office/Cedega/Wine. I choose Linux/FreeBSD/OpenBSD for almost all server scenarios. Why would I argue so much in favor of Windows? Because it's just not that bad! I respect Linux for its purpose, and I don't feel mainstream desktops is currently its strongest area. Wait a few years. In the same way I don't favor either AMD or Intel, I choose each for its purpose. I run an AMD in my desktop, but my servers would be slugs if I went with AMD there. (I've never seen dual-dual core Opterons beat quad-Xeon systems, end of story. )

I use Emacs! I have a Lisp, if you know what I mean. I run Apache! I prefer Awk/Grep/Vi to Microsoft Office. Alternatively, I prefer MSN Messenger to AMSN/GAIM/KoPete, and I prefer Visual Studio's debugger to GDB, (though GCC is still first in my heart! <3 )

To be honest, I like Windows Server 2003 and I've heard some incredible things about Longhorn Server, especially on a 64-bit processor. The TCP/IP stack improvements make a -huge- difference in a high-performance environment. Whenever I run a Debian desktop with all the software I'll use, it comes out to be no smaller than my XP installations. I think the registry is a great concept with a poor implementation. I prefer NFS to Samba! I like SSH, not telnet! SSH beats Remote Desktop any day! Crazy stuff.

So in the end..
The media about Vista has been all negative, or factual with a negative spin. Vista is doing far better than too many people realize. I've heard comments like, "The only difference between Vista and XP are a 3D desktop and more bloat," when it's just simply not true. I try as hard as I can to see operating systems arguments objectively, (no matter how well it ever works!) Vista seems to be just the next progression. Even if it takes 15gb in the end, we could make the same argument for Windows 3.1 coming on a few floppies, compared with 95's big ol' CD! Remember those 16mb ram chips? Compare that with 96gb of RAM in low-end Sun servers! Things are moving too fast to stay close to things; you have to step back and put things in perspective every once in a while.

Just for the record, great debate here also. Sorry if anything I said came out badly; I'm trying hard to stay objective and on-track.