Along with the release of the Windows 7 release candidate came new system requirements for Microsoft's next operating system. This updated set of requirements has been declared final, making them the official system requirements for Windows 7 final. Seeing Microsoft's rather... Dubious past dealings with minimum system requirements, let's take a look at Windows 7's.
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Member since:2006-05-04
Member since:2007-12-16
memory used after boot: 90MB (it can go down to ~78MB)
The default install of Debian 4.0 and GNOME 2 needed less than 70 megs without extra apps running. I myself have used Debian with Compiz on 500 MHz Athlon K6 and GeForce 2 MX and it run fairly well though not with maximum FPS, of course.
Solution: don't install the graphics drivers. My installation of XP SP3 with 17 processes ate about 85 megs too, until I installed nVidia display drivers. It added 20 megs rightaway.
Member since:2005-07-24
You've just described my eeepc 701. And it does just dandy on 512MB and 530MHz-900MHz cpu. It came with 256MB and locked at (I think) 630MHz with Xandros, and I don't recall that being too terribly bad.
Besides, the OP was talking about it being nice if the minimum requirement were 512MB.
Edited 2009-05-01 20:33 UTC
Member since:2008-04-10
Member since:2006-02-15
You can get a functional Linux desktop out of 512MB on a Linux machine with some careful software choices and no Firefox/OO.o
Don't lie. I have myself two computers running complete GNOME desktops, one has 256MB RAM and the other has 512MB, and hell, I have Apache, FireFox and web-development utilities running all the time on the latter one. There was absolutely no reason to carefully select software.. I just installed the freaking default GNOME desktop on Mandriva.
So, to say "other modern OS's run very nice"on 512MB is simply not true. It requires lots of work (Linux)
What you are saying simply is not true. I have several computers proving you incorrect.
Member since:2005-06-29
Well, so far, whenever I ran any modern Linux distribution on 512MB it hasn't been an optimal experience. Especially Firefox and OpenOffice are notoire memory suckers, and launching a few tabs in FF or a few docs in OOo would bring it all to a screeching halt. Bring in something like Flash...
I personally wouldn't recommend a default Ubuntu or similar distribution installation if they have a <1GB system.
However, as always, mileage may vary 
.
Member since:2005-07-11
Ubuntu on 512MB? Or worse yet, Mac OS X on 512MB? "
Kubuntu 8.10, with KDE 4.2.2 installed, runs just fine on an Asus eeePC 701 (900 MHz Celeron, 512 MB RAM, no swap, 4 GB disk). Including OpenOffice.org and Firefox 3. This is my media jukebox (Amarok 2) and school work computer.
I've also run Xubuntu 8.04 with XFce 4.x on a P3 450 MHz laptop with 256 MB RAM. Didn't have OpenOffice installed as it was our media centre (video-out to the TV), but it did run Firefox 2.x just fine, along with Kaffeine for watching video, streamed over a wifi connection using smb4k.
You must have extremely high standards.
And that's a bald-faced lie, to say the least.
Member since:
2005-06-29
Ubuntu on 512MB? Or worse yet, Mac OS X on 512MB?
You must have pretty low standards. You can get a functional Linux desktop out of 512MB on a Linux machine with some careful software choices and no Firefox/OO.o, but Mac OS X? Good luck. Even on 1GB of RAM OS X always feels sluggish. It doesn't become as snappy as W7 or Ubuntu until you hit 1.5-2GB.
So, to say "other modern OS's run very nice"on 512MB is simply not true. It requires lots of work (Linux) or it's impossible (Mac OS X).