Why Vista need 2be hardware hungry? So hardware still sells?

Is it all the pretty things you see....is it the new Office running differently buy still printing out the same document results? Is it DX10? What is it?

Just wondering why it is really necessary that Vista needs such heavy system specs to run fast and make reall progress in running programs faster (I mean XP with more ram and more cpu power would run programs faster as well). Some people come in here talking about their systems to run fine with low system specs. I bet they would say the same running 512mb ram with some cheap celeron outdated cpu. They just can't tell the difference.
My question is.....why does every Microsoft OS keeps on getting heavier. Does this have to do with keeping the hardware firms happy so they can sell hardware again? What makes Vista special over XP that you need more pc power to run it totally smooth. How could Microsoft after this Vista even make a more heavier pc chewing OS? I think they can...how? I think we are seeying a great example allready. Please dont come with examples like comparisons between 98 and XP as this was a much huger step in progression than XP - Vista really is. I mean...what if DX10 functions (it's possible for sure and even more if this would save the world from going under ) could run with XP with a nice shell looking just like Vista (=less recources)? Explanation please.

ps: people who say they run their Vista superb with 1gb memory please dont post in here....you don't know what you are talking about as microsoft admits it needs 2gb too run >>>>smooth<<<<.

Hey SyPh, do you run Vista on any of your computers? Are you getting ready to run Vista on anything? Do you want to run Vista on anything? Just wondering...

Tech process it sounds so easy to say doesn't it Now could you explain to me why Vista will later be a lot faster. Something XP can't be updated with to reach the same speed?

XP is at a dead end for security without a major SP package like when they implemented their firewall. Do you remember the roar from people who refused to use it because they believed it changed the OS too much? I still know people who won't implement that particular SP for that reason. The security enhancements for Vista were not the level originally expected for Vista by its release date because of their decision to not use the new file system, but the overall security changes made it simply impossible to implement on XP without another major SP overhaul - so why not just wait and implement it on a new OS? I would suspect they thought that way, when there are incompatibilities due to security, it can be blamed on the normal bugs in a new OS and not another SP that makes too big of a change to the existing OS. As far as using more memory, the new services do seem to be resource hogs and the XP kernel was not designed to use the larger memory footprint as efficiently as Vista (at least that is what MS is saying - the whitepapers agree but they are usually written by MS employess, so who knows how efficient it really is with the bigger footprint). I have 3 PCs side by side at work that have only a GPU difference, one with XP ATI, another Vista NVidia and another with Vista ATI. The Vista ATI is faster than the other 2 - so at least on a driver level, Vista appears to perform better with better written drivers. Would a kernel that more efficiently uses a larger memory footprint lead to performance increases - it would seem logical and would explain why going from 1G to 2G dramatically increases performance in Vista while its less so in XP.

Ah, np my mistake