Eh, most hard drives you buy with a PC are 40GB. Many are way bigger.

That'* only a packaged size as well. WinXP takes up a few gigs once installed. Vista actually takes up around 8 or 9. It really isn't that big of a deal if you think about it. It'* a new OS for new computers. You just have to be with the times...

im looking forward to getting my hands on a full version... i guess my gig of ram is going to have to double..

Well, I'm running the Beta on 1gig, and it'* been fine. Although if you wanna run a lot of apps, 2 gigs is the way to go.

Not with the times.... of course... but do ya think soon the chip industry will outgrow the need for a hard drive. With the way chip size keeps going down and Memory up, it seems it will all be digital before long. wouldnt that really boost speed with no buss needed?

there will always bee a need for some type of hard drive.....

Either it going to be some type of flash drive or Blue ray sopmething, or a little credit type card thing that hold 100GB..

BUT the CPU and Memory will never big the only thing you have in your PC for Space

Right now I have a p4 3.4 Extreme Edition with 2 gigs of ram and 980gb out of 1600gb free of hardrive space. The only bottleneck I can think of is the ATI 9800 Pro card I have since it only has 128 mb of ram.

Y'all gotta keep in mind the other stuff that'* been mentioned.

Since this is a Beta still...

Drivers won't be complete
OS has not yet been fully optimized
There will most likely be extra, hidden, apps tracking performance running
etc....

I hope that Vista will be optimized in terms of getting rid of its bloat. But its MS so FAT CHANCE!!!!1!!!1!1!1

Yea, so I will be using XP for a loooooooooooong time...

I remember when the same was said about xp (saying I would use w2k for along time )

Yea, but the thing is that back then that would have held some water since some games coded for 98 didn't work on the NT kernel because of their obvious differences. And the differences between 2000 and Xp was very small. Now all we have here is an upgrade of the NT kernel, it should work both ways without a problem unless the program is specifically locked to Vista. There should be no reason why a program coded for Vista should not work just the same on XP. DX10 may be an issue, but there will be some hobbyists who will backport it into XP, you just wait and see. Myself as well as many others are not going to plop wasted money down on a crappy GUI which I will end up turning off anyway. Security improvements? I haven't had a virus in years, not an issue to me.