I just "Stumbled Upon" this article from Hubpages.com and article which compared one of the earliest 'personal' computers (an Apple Mac Plus). What it concluded was what Adam and I complain about on the show often and what all computer users feel when they sit down at their keyboards; our computers are not any faster today, than they were 10 or more years ago.
Processors, hard drives, RAM have all increased exponentially in the last 20 years, but unfortunately so has modern operating systems. The article I linked above pointed out the gargantuan disk requirements of Windows Vista, so I decided to put together a little table comparing disk space and RAM requirements for the different flavors of operating systems. It is quite eye opening.
It is my experience that the vast majority of computer users simply want their computer to work for their activities. They don't need hundreds of extra 'features' that never get used or provide any real benefit. Computers now boot too slowly, perform slowly and don't give us any more productivity than they did 20 years ago.
| Operating System |
Hard Drive Space Required |
RAM Required |
| Windows 3.11 | 10 megabytes (mb) | 4 mb |
| Mac OS 6 | 1 mb | 1 mb |
| Windows 95 | 60 mb | 8 mb |
| Mac OS 9 | 40 mb | 32 mb |
| Windows 98 | 250 mb | 16 mb |
| Windows XP | 1,800 mb | 256 mb (prefer 512 or greater) |
| Mac OS 10.4 | 3,000 mb | 256 mb |
| Windows Vista | 15,000 mb | 512 mb (prefer 1024 or greater) |
| Ubuntu Linux | 3,000 mb | 256 mb |
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