bill - 7:08 am on Jun 6, 2012 (gmt 0)

Actually Windows 7 broke that pattern of requiring more resources than its predecessor. I know it takes less than Vista, and it seems to beat XP for me. I was able to put Win7 Ultimate on an old underpowered Atom-core netbook and it killed XP in terms of performance and battery life. Supposedly Windows 8 requires even less resources than Windows 7, but I haven't tested it out on anything more than a virtual machine at this point.