I DON'T HAVE TO HAVE I.E. INSTALLED? REALLY?
*BRAIN ASPLODES IN GLEE AT THE POSSIBILITY* ?
I'm going to assume you don't think this is great thing and you're just being a smartass (which I loled at, so don't think I'm coming at you, lol).
The reason I listed the fact that IE doesn't have to be on your computer in Win7, is because:
1.) Gets viruses easier than most other mainstream browsers.
2.) Unlike 90% of all the mainstream tabbed browsers, In IE7-8 it creates new instances of explorer and puts them into the main MDI window. So 5 tabs is the same as having IE open 5 times... resource stupid if you ask me.
3.) The file explorer in Vista was driven (and required) IE to be installed on your computer... meaning if you had anything wrong with IE (say a virus), browsing your files could potentially give the virus access to your filesystem! That scares the hell out of me for multiple reasons, but I doubt I'd need to go into description.
4.) IE SUCKS, always has, always will... and to have the option to say "buh-bye" is a warming feeling to someone who knows what hell IE has cost and caused web devs world-wide.
My laptop has 2G RAM, total. On both Vista and W7, letting the OS sit there and do nothing takes up ~50% of my RAM (~1G), so I don't know what you're talking about.
And part of that RAM usage is precaching, which exists in both Vista and W7, so the OS isn't actually using that much, it's just reserving some space since it's expecting you to use one of your most commonly used applications.
My GF has a 4 year old Toshiba Satellite M115-S1061.
Has an Intel Celeron M Processor 420 (1.60GHz, 1MB L2, 533MHz FSB) & 512MB PC4200 DDR2 and IT runs at 20% on idle, XP had her running 75% on idle (granted assume 3 years of bad choices for the XP %).
She's flying on that computer, and it's an honest POS... two weeks ago we restarted it and it wouldn't turn back on until I opened it up and cleaned the connections from they PSU to the mobo... (Post win7 install).
Her computer would be crawling if it had Vista installed... which is why I state, it's running faster than XP so there in-lies my reasoning for stating it handles resources as well XP (in this case better).
(Experience May Vary, lol)