Microsoft have decided that Service Pack 3, which will provided XP with numerous security updates, bugfixes and feature improvements, will be delayed until the second half of 2007, because developing Windows Bloatware Edition (aka Vista, wtf else do you call an OS that needs 2Gb of RAM?) is more important to them than keeping their current customers safe and secure.
Vista currently runs well with significantly less than 1GB of RAM. Still a lot of RAM, but it seems fairly standard these days. By the time of release, 2GB will be nothing for a new PC.
Er… 2Gb for the version with all the features - Microsoft’s spec, not mine, they announced it at the same time as they named the different Vista versions (I’ll see if I can dig up a link). And since Vista is supposed to be released by the end of the year, I can’t really see 2Gb of RAM being ‘nothing for a new PC’ by then.
2GB is the recommended for the 64-bit version only, which is obvious (all pointers are now double the size).
It will run fine on even 512MB ram on a 32-bit machine.
But yes, it is a hardware hog.
My mistake - although 1Gb for an operating system is still horrendously bloated. Although 1Gb is the reccomended spec, for most software you will never get acceptable performance with the minimum - e.g. the minimum spec for XP is a 233Mhz processor with 64Mb of RAM, but I would like to see anyone actually running XP with that (*shudders*)
1GB, as I said, is not the minimum. It’s the recommended spec for hardware vendors. The minimum will most likely be less than 512. 512 was the recommended for the first beta, anyhows (link).