I have a question for the Visual Studio 2008 development folks.  Why did you set the published system requirements at 1.6 Ghz? 

WHS (Windows Home Server) requirements are 1.0 GHz.  A lot of folks are taking old boxes and trying out WHS on them.  VWD 2005 only had a CPU requirement of 600 MHz.  By setting your published minimum CPU at 1.6 GHz you're scaring all most all those potential users away from your product and back into VWD 2005.  You almost scared me away.

I finally bit and loaded it on my WHS machine.  It works just fine on WHS OS (essentially Win Server 2003 which is at its guts XP) with only 1.0 GHz CPU. 

I can see if you were Vista or something but my bet is it will work AOK on XP with a 1.0 GHz as well.

WHS isn't a workstation or a development environment, and VS isn't designed to be used on WHS.  WHS is basically for serving shared media content in a home, along with some functions such as backup of workstations.  As for XP, it's is a defunct OS in Microsoft terms.  Sales were supposed to have been suspended already, and have been extended only for a relatively short period.

That said, minimum requirements are listed as minimums because it works at that level and above.  It might or might not work with lower requirements, and you may or may not be happy with its performance.  If you're satisfied, use it as you will.  But don't blame Microsoft if something is too slow for you.

Jeff

Min configuration does not imply VS will refuse to start. You surely can use lower end machine, especially if your projects are not complex. Min configuration is set based on product performance using certain "typical" solutions. If your solution is smaller or you are willing to tolerate longer build or response times, you can use older machine.

WHS is a server OS optimized for file and network I/O, not for applications. Fast CPU is not a requirement for network I/O. I don't think WHS is intended to be used as a workstation for application development.