You can thank Vista for that… by the time you take the operating system and all it’s do dads. the space it wants to work in, Office, and of course the really efficient Vista auto back up system that eats drive space, you have to really think that the first 150GB of your hard drive are used up. And 1GB of ram is really the minimum to run Vista, and even then it bogs down. You really need 2 GB minimum and to purr along I suspect you’d want 4, which means a 64 bit system.

The downside is a lot pf people were sold crippled laptops because they had an operating system that the machine couldn’t handle – the bright side is the manufacturers are having to come up with new er higher performance laptop hardware.