Yes, Windows 95 run on 4MB RAM, Windows 2000 on 64MB. Than the bloat came, and nowadays Windows 10 looks more blant and has reduced UI than ever and still requires and runs as slow as Windows 7 which had a lot of themes and transparent effects and a rather modern and nice interface. No wonder several parts of the interface like the startmenu are now in dotNet. It was already a major mistake that lead to the restart of the Longhorn project which became Vista - the former dotNet based Explorer and shell and WinFS all were dotNet applications and very slow. I run WinFS beta 2 on WinXP on an high end PC at that time and it was promising but aweful slow. Instead of adding the database-like features to NTFS driver (parts of the object features from Cairo project are still there), they added an filesystem filter driver in userland and a dotNet service. Needless to say that idiotic design and relying on dotNet for a mission critical component never worked out. Vista shipped with an improved WinXP desktop search.