yes, and Vista is great now. From what i remember Vista was suppose to be what 7 is, and then shareholders wanted it to be release sooner, so Vista was the product of that. I would like to see a Microsoft OS that is great out of the box, that would be awesome. Ask any coder, the one thing they hate more than deadlines, are deadlines that have been moved up.
i feel bad for even replying to this, as we are getting off topic here, but really, there is just no reason an OS should use that much memory, no reason. As programs evolve they should get more efficient, not less. The same can be said for KDE 4.0, it was released to soon, basically released a beta, but anyways, it uses less memory over KDE 3.5 and thats how it should be. Even when XP came out it was considered to be a hog. The honest, only reason why Microsoft has Vista use as much power as it does is to keep hardware vendors happy. Hey, Microsoft, we are making all this bigger faster hardware, but no one is buying it. (oh wait, you need 4gbs of memory to surf the internet and word process??? no) This is the advent of the netbook/top, and they use linux. So they pump up system requirements so people have to upgrade their hardware. Don't give me the 3D desktop thing ether, because Apple and various Linux distros have had 3d desktops for awhile now, and they run on embedded graphics. So, why does Microsoft do the things they do??? money, the end user is not their concern. Its a horrible cycle, one they NEED to break, a new "better" OS should for no reason use the amount of power that Vista generally requires.