Surprising (?) Feature Request for Windows 7: "Make Windows Faster"

And no, they didn't mean make it faster with faster hardware. I wrote earlier about Microsoft's new Windows 7 blog, and in their second blog post, Microsoft (specifically, Microsoft Senior VP Steven Sinofsky) wrote about the myriad of comments and suggestions for Windows 7 they've received since the blog went live. And what caught their eye?

I would say by and large the reception has been very warm and we definitely appreciate that. The most frequent request was to discuss Windows performance and/or just “make Windows faster”. There’s a lot to this topic so we expect to talk about this quite a bit over the next months.

Ah yes, performance, one of the big issues with so-called "Vista-Capable" PCs, which were anything but. Well, they were capable of running it, just not well, and as revealed by past Microsoft emails, they knew it.

Indeed, some of the slowdown of Vista vs. XP is all the friendliness and feature-richness of the OS (i.e., bloat). It doesn't look like Windows 7 will be slimmed down by any means, looking at
"some of the main feature teams" ---

• Applets and Gadgets
• Assistance and Support Technologies
• Core User Experience
• Customer Engineering and Telemetry
• Deployment and Component Platform
• Desktop Graphics
• Devices and Media
• Devices and Storage
• Documents and Printing
• Engineering System and Tools
• File System
• Find and Organize
• Fundamentals
• Internet Explorer (including IE 8 down-level)
• International
• Kernel & VM
• Media Center
• Networking - Core
• Networking - Enterprise
• Networking - Wireless
• Security
• User Interface Platform
• Windows App Platform

Whew. How big a hard drive will I need for Windows 7?