>>117449
I upgraded to XP pretty fine, as did most people I knew. Most Windows upgrades were a bit of a pain, but Vista's stated minimum was a huge jump, let alone the actual system requirements.
Yeah, XP's useful sysreqs were definitely pretty high vs 98 or ME's, although given that they were basically 2x what ME really wanted and just slightly higher than what Win2k wanted, things weren't that bad regarding what the market was offering around the time.
2k wasn't a consumer-targeted OS, but companies weren't really shipping machines significantly weaker than XP's minimum system requirements at the time, unlike what happened when Vista came out.

In the meantime, companies absolutely tried to sell systems with less than 1GB of RAM with Vista (they called it a "Windows Vista Capable PC" lmao). Genuinely hilarious. 1GB was the absolute bare minimum for a usable Vista system, ignoring any other dumb bullshit that came up like hastily slapped together Vista drivers. 2GB, you were really getting somewhere.

...at the time, I had a laptop with 512MB of RAM running XP and felt like I'd never run out of RAM lmao.

Also, to this day I genuinely don't know why Windows is so absurdly hyper-fat post-Vista. I have zero clue what it's doing with all that disk space space or RAM (or rather, I have zero clue why it needs so much of it).
I can literally install every single package in a current version of Slackware, just absolute assloads of software, and Windows with basically fucking nothing is a significant fraction of that size. Absolutely psychotic.