I have an 8gb machine (memory) and it runs without a hitch.
I have a 200MHz PC with 128 MB memory without a HD but with two CF cards. It runs Puppy Linux without a hitch. The system is on a CF card, so I can take it away and use Win 3.11 when needed.
Win7 takes 7.62 GB, Win 311 about 32 MB.
I find no good reason, why the OS should be so large.
There was all the colours, sounds and basic tools I needed in WIn 311.One thing that has changed is that there has born a lot of devices, who don't work with standards: printers, VGA cards, Sound cards...
Still. I have only one screen, one VGA card and only PS printers.
Win 3.11 had network drivers and USB drivers can be installed.
There was all the basic tools: paint, notepad, file explorer.
Where is the beef ?
Okay, Win311 can not be run over new MSDOS version, so it can not use large memories or HDs. Still this is a minor thing. In Linux the file system is separated from the main executables. It could have been done to Windows too. Without knowing better I think this is done in the new versions of Windows.
If you go in Win9x/NT/2k/XP/Vista/7 you find hundreds and hundreds of programs without any documentation. Are they of any use, if you don't even know what they are ?
There is even programs you want to get rid of ASAP, like the damned Tour and IE.
I've been told that Win7 has great abilities for sound, video, graphics etc. Why ? Everyone I know installs in any case her own programs in the system. VLC for video, Audacity for sound, ACAD or some painting program for graphics.
There is this WordBad and Not-so-Bad for simple text handling. Still everybody is installing OpenOffice to her PC.
The first thing my customers are doing is installing Firefox,Thunderbird and Lightning even thoug there is IE.
There is a lot of rumours about removing IE. What I have heard is that it will still be there but the lings are removed. THis is understndable, because IE is a part of the main system. It seems that FileExplorer is only a side effect of InternetExplorer, or vice versa.
This analogy stinks :|
Also, SP1 did fix a lot of the problems that Vista had.
Windows XP was honed during the years and didn't have very many problems, so they had to build another to give us a new bunch of problems.
They could have continued in small steps and added new and tested parts on a well behaving system, like it is done in Linux, but they had to build SP3 and those damned updates of 2008 to show us how old, bad and vulnerable the old system was.
I'm running XP and Win7 (and two Linux PC) side by side all the time with a KVM. So far Win7 has been a winner: 14 times BSOD, WinXP none. (mostly somehow connected to antivirus and TDS.SYS). Linux uptime 400+ days. Windows restarted daily becasue of configuration changes.