Originally posted here by pooh sun tzu

Right now we are looking at around roughly for a minimum requirement system of:

- Pentium III 1ghz
- 512 MB RAM
- 3G storage for the OS
- Normal ethernet card (1GIG built in? come on guys.. learn to lie better)
- Any 3d compliant card that runs as powerful as an Nvidia GeForce 2 MX w/ 64 Megs of RAM.

recommended setups:

- Pentium IV 2ghz
- 1 Gb RAM
- 5G storage for the OS
- Normal ethernet card (1GIG built in? come on guys.. learn to lie better)
- 3d compatible card that meets the processing power of the current top of the line Nvidia card.

Think ahead in terms, not behind. Just like Bill never saw the need to ever have more than 12 Mb of RAM, he knew that computers would eventually require it for some function or feature. Just as a pentium III would seem like a "OMFG WHY DO WE NEED THAT!" if shown to someone back in the commodor 64 days, a OS requiring these specs (the ones I listed, not the fake ones) because of the innate and under-the-hood features (no, not just eye candy, bloated does NOT always equal bad and unessessary) are something that will be common place when Longhorn hits.
True, machines like this might be the norm in several years more time, like the several years that passed between the Commodore and PIII you referenced. My two major points (FWIW) are:

1. At this point in time, and the next couple of years, requirements such as these are ludicrous. Six or eight years down the road, maybe not; but for now they are.

2. An OS that can take advantage of good resources is great. An OS that demands those resources to run anywhere near effectively is itself a poor OS, IMO. This is where *nix is going to be able to make good strides on the desktop market. Like mentioned above, most users are surfing, emailing, and typing. They don't want to spend $1000 on a new machine and $300 on its software to do what near-free software can do on the machine they currently have (or the ones they can buy for 3-400 from Dell et al) Hell, most regular users I know are still on 98 or me, with a few on 2000; really not too many have xp yet.

It has been my experience that the recommended requirements are the ones you need to run the OS efficiently. And taking your word (which I most certainly do, having read your posts before ) I must say that requiring a P4 and a gig of ram is currently, and still will be for several years, ridiculous.