Speaking of Mac OS X, you can number the AtAT staff among those who used to find the operating system's listed requirements just a teensy bit on the heavy side; needing a Mac that originally shipped with at least a G3 doesn't bother us terribly, since we fully understand that Apple can only support so much hardware just out of the gate. But the 128 MB RAM requirement has always given us pause, even though extra RAM is so cheap these days. There's still something that bugs us about an operating system that needs four times the base RAM of an iBook that shipped a year and a half ago. (Heck, even today's base-model iBook only ships with 64 MB of RAM-- and Mac OS X is preloaded on its hard drive.)

On second thought, though, we have run Mac OS X on a PowerBook with only 64 MB of RAM, and it performed pretty well-- at least until we started running Classic apps. So at least Apple's posted requirements are realistic, and possibly even slightly on the cautious side, despite the fact that Mac OS X will happily chew up as much RAM as you can throw it. Now, Microsoft's requirements, on the other hand, seem to be a different matter altogether. We had a friend once who actually tried to run Windows 95 on a 486 with the bare minimum listed RAM and hard drive space just to see what would happen, and the results would have been comical if they hadn't been so utterly sad. (We're hoping he shot that 486 out behind the woodshed to put it out of its misery.) So what are we to make of the expected requirements for this fall's Windows XP?

The corporate line is that any Wintel purchased "from late 1999 onward" should be just fine for Windows XP; note that Mac OS X supports Macs built a couple of years earlier, so the next time you're complaining about how Apple's latest OS isn't supported on your Power Mac 9600, remember that things could be worse. Moreover, according to a ZDNet article forwarded to us by faithful viewer Dale Rodgie, Gartner analyst Michael Silver thinks Microsoft's official requirements are bunk; "you want to avoid installing Windows XP on a system more than a year old," says he. (Personally, we want to avoid installing Windows XP altogether, but hey, to each his own.)

And whereas right now Microsoft claims that a "300 MHz Pentium II processor and 128 MB of RAM" is "all" that's required to run current builds, "the final version of Windows XP is expected to carry more stringent requirements." How stringent? Well, Mike thinks that Microsoft's late-1999-hardware recommendation is "a little aggressive" and that a 650-800 MHz Pentium III is a more realistic minimum. Oh, and about that 128 MB of RAM-- Mike recommends that "households sharing a single PC might want to start with a minimum 256 MB of memory." Yikes! Again, we realize that RAM is cheap, but Jiminy Christmas, that sounds awfully high to us. Suddenly Apple's "1997-and-onwards G3- and G4-based Macs with 128 MB of RAM" sounds positively generous.