Windows Vista: hardwarerequirements

 I recently started building my (first) computer - so far got ATX case, PSU, 400 GB Hard disk (PATA, dont ask me why not SATA), speakers. I know the heart is missing - CPU, mother board and memory. I am planning to buy decent mother board with 2 display support so that I don't need to buy video card. 

With recent announcements from both AMD and Intel, I thought of giving a closer look at where the technology is heading. 


If you look at Microsoft Vista minimum requirements, they tried to give an impression that most of the systems bought today (or in the last year) will be fine - at least for Vista capable, if not for Vista premium. But, I think one way of looking at those numbers is to look for what Microsoft announced for Windows xp. Here are they: from http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/sp2/sysreqs.mspx
 

• 233 megahertz (MHz) processor
  
• 64 megabytes (MB) of RAM
  
• 1.8 GB of available hard disk space during installation
  

And every one knows how windows systems perform with at least 10 times faster CPU, 10 times memory and 10 times hard disk.

So, when Microsoft says you need 1GHz CPU, 1GB RAM and 40 GB hard disk, go figure...I bet any thing less than dual-core at 2GHz, 1.5GB RAM will be asking for trouble.
I am yet to see any comments from beta testers about the specs...I bet they may not be running 'real world applications' all the time.