I disagree, Windows 7 needs a gig of Ram, a GHz of processor, 16 gig of HD space and at least a DX9 GFX card. What do I get in return for this over a 32Meg 486? Not enough IMHO.
Ok, let me see...
A 32MB 486 would absolutely CRAWL when browsing most modern websites.
I find it unlikely that you could find a workable 486 configuration that could play simultaneous audio streams. It would probably be a bit of a stretch playing an mp3 and continuing to multitask.
I bet most modern graphical web browsers would take an age to load on it.
What operating systems would work well for a user on such hardware? Perhaps a granny with Win311 and Office 4.3 would be happy typing her letters and printing them, but I can't imagine many more would be.
Skype + mic or even including a webcam (including hypothetical USB ports)? Good luck.
Downloading images from a digital camera and doing minor editing work like rotation? In those days, today's typical camera resolutions would have been classed as impossibly high-res, to rotate one image would probably take about 10 minutes.
Synchronising an mp3 collection with an mp3 player? Good luck.
Computer games? Ok, UFO: Enemy Unknown absolutely rocked. So do a few other games possibly of a similar age, but any Flash game for example?
I imagine a 486 would be fairly taxed with a NIC pushed to say 10Mbit/sec, so downloading a file off the Internet at high speed would very likely be a single-tasking experience, practically speaking.
Automatic updating of the operating system would also be fairly taxing.
I now run a machine that's over 100 times faster than my old blue lightning but it's far from 100 times quicker in practice, so much power is eaten up by the OS. Even mundane background programs like the BBC iPlayers updater use over 30Mb of RAM and as for the file structure, who knows what half of those .dll files do, why many of them are repeated over your hard disk or if they are even necessary.
Oh, thanks for pointing one out. BBC iPlayer. On a 486? Even with say 1GB RAM and a hypothetical DX10 graphics card with video decoding acceleration capabilities?
The rules of the game have changed with regard to designing apps for modern computers. RAM back then was expensive. Now it is dirt cheap, as is storage space. Having 4GB RAM and 99% unused as opposed to using say 25% of it and having everything run faster should be a no-brainer for most people to work out, it's just a case of good memory management if case a user wished to use 80% for a particular set of tasks. You're complaining about the BBC iPlayer using 30MB RAM. Just think about what you're saying! The BBC iPlayer application in the days of the 486 would have been considered the realm of supercomputing, the resolutions involved are enormous. The 486 handling the rendering could probably do a frame every minute if you're lucky. More reasonably, a frame every ten minutes.
To make the example fairer, taking a video format and a player specially compiled for the 486 platform, it would still be unwatchable by most peoples' standards.
The expectations for computers have also changed drastically.
Even MS themselves have admitted that they have lost track of the file interdepedencies in Windows. The only reality is that MS has a monopoly that can't be broken. I use Windows because I have to (my university software requires it)
Blah, blah, blah. Insert any modern OS into the examples I gave for a 486 to run and it would crawl, and please note that I picked tasks that the average user would currently expect their computer to perform to their satisfaction.
Yes, Windows is broken in quite a few ways, but your argument has so many holes in that I'm surprised you even managed to get to the end of your post without rethinking it.
Computers have grown, Windows has grown larger still, but I would say that's largely because Microsoft is going too far in terms of backwards compatibility (and that a pruning job is needed), but I think if you gave a teenager a 486 PC with the most ideal user-orientated software platform and optimised as much as possible for the hardware, even if you added a gig of RAM and today's performance in hard disk speeds, the teenager would feel that you had just put MS-DOS 6.22 in front of them and said "enjoy", purely because of the amount of extras that come with most modern operating systems these days.
