Early adopters generally expect to be punished by both Apple and Microsoft. And "minimum requirements" are codewords meaning "known to install on this machine."
Software companies choose to allocate their resources among various things. Such as new features, maintaining reverse compatibility, performance, bugfixes, etc. And many companies intentionally aim big releases at computers more powerful than what is commonly available. You can spend time optimizing your software, or just wait (pray) for computers to increase in performance.
That said, that 2nd page of the review is pretty pointless. Upgrading her current machine, and to a pre-release OS no less, is doomed to failure. I'm personally fine with Win2k.
On 2/1/07, Chuck <chuck at mutualaid.org> wrote:
> The problem is that programmers and developers get used to computers
> which are incredibly fat when it comes to memory and speed. There is
> little incentive to develop lean and mean programs. Okay, maybe wireless
> devices have spawned a greater, profitable interest in lean programming.
True... And yet the flipside is that many programmers are stuck building cathedrals out of toothpicks. They're overwhelmed with the complexity of weak tools. The head theologians at companies like Microsoft are perfectly aware of it.
"And you're right: we were not out to win over the Lisp programmers; we were after the C++ programmers. We managed to drag a lot of them about halfway to Lisp. Aren't you happy?" <http://people.csail.mit.edu/gregs/ll1-discuss-archive-html/msg04045.html>
Tayssir