Nope. They are just recommending you have 8gb if you are going to be doing word processing and such. They do recommend "4 GB of disk space (for full installation and swap space)" as a minimum drive size.
That seems very tiny to me but maybe your laptop is older than I thought. 
nah, 4GB is fine. XP is almost 10GB i think. and I only have 20GB to spare on this machine. that's why I wanna make it a cloud-ish machine.
gonna download gOS before I leave the library. really my biggest fear here, is that I'm going to install a new OS, and my Wireless card won't work right off the bat...which will screw me, since I don't have internet at home to plug into right now.
