>>13
I understand, Microsoft aren't exactly doing the greatest job, they should offer more for the 7gb and they do code a lot of bloated stuff. I haven't actually checked what the 7gb is "spent on", though I can at least talk about the Mac - the OS is now something like 4gb, and for that you get all these amazing frameworks and features for developers to use, a whole bunch of useful partitioning, syncing, screen capturing, colour matching, task automating utilities, an illustrated dictionary, thesaurus and spellcheck function, high quality calendaring\contacts\IM\mail apps, blah blah blah. While of course they could be smaller and more efficient, in a way they don't really need to be and if you're not nitpicking too harshly you can see a lot of improvements in the OS to justify the creep in install size. And with prices at well under 50 cents a gigabyte, does it even matter?
Vista might not be all of the way there, but if you poke around the beta you'll note there sure is a lot more bundled free stuff than there is in XP, and I'd imagine the new frameworks that underpin the OS like Avalon would be providing the fundamentals for future stuff that justifies a larger install.
>>15
I get your point, but I think you're pushing the "XP is just like 98" and "taking up my whole CPU, HDD and RAM" points a little far. XP is not as good as it should be, but I don't find it that outrageous that my virtual machine of XP is 1gb, for instance. It's true XP isn't 10x better than 98 for 10x the hard drive space, but seeing as we're not using Pentium Pros anymore it might not be of such importance.