System Requirements for Vista

[Alan]

As the Windows Vista release slowly looms towards us one of the most asked questions is what are the system requirements. The true answer is we wont know until this summer but a few web sites have published their guesses at it which ofcourse misleads many.

After talking to friends in the know, this is what I have found out.

All Microsoft will say is this:
Minimum system requirements will not be known until summer 2006 at the earliest. However, these guidelines provide useful estimates:

512 megabytes (MB) or more of RAM
A dedicated graphics card with DirectX® 9.0 support
A modern, Intel Pentium- or AMD Athlon-based PC.

Now before you rush out and order a copy Daniel, if Microsoft is saying 512MB of RAM minimum then you can bank on twice that much to benefit from all the features of Windows Vista.
Certainly you'll need a fast processor (over 2 GB) and you computer will need a dedicated graphics card. Many low-end computers come with shared graphics cards which use some of your system's RAM. These types of shared graphics cards will not work with Windows Vista, which is intensely graphical.
Microsoft is very ambitious with Windows Vista and, if you're using an older computer it might be wise to wait and get a new PC with Windows Vista pre-installed. But, then you'll have to be careful that you buy a computer with more than just the "minimum" requirements to run Windows Vista or you could end up like so many people who purchased new computers when Windows XP came out that barely met the minimum requirements to run XP and were disappointed in it. Whatever Microsoft lists for minimum requirements are bare minimums and you should never buy a new computer that meets only the minimum requirements if you do, you will proberly be disappointed.

Any comments or views on that?

[Daniel]

Hmmm yes. You're right. Most of the time the minimum requirements are stupid. I think that they make them as low as possible so taht more users will upgrade their current system ... I'm talking about other applications in general too.

The statement I can't understand is:

Microsoft is very ambitious with Windows Vista and, if you're using an older computer it might be wise to wait and get a new PC with Windows Vista pre-installed.

... which does not make sense if:

then you'll have to be careful that you buy a computer with more than just the "minimum" requirements to run Windows Vista or you could end up like so many people who purchased new computers when Windows XP came out that barely met the minimum requirements to run XP and were disappointed in it.

Anyways, when Vista ir released in 2007 I think stores will be selling their systems with VISTA installed. To be honest I don't remember what was done when Windows XP was released, but I doubt they continued to sell Windows 2000 or ME.

Regarding Windows Vista requirements, I agree with Microsoft, you can't release or calculate them, although they say that nothink major is going to change. However, in 1 year time we will be having hardware which we never though off, remember how technology is advancing everyday.

But, we all can conclude that Vista needs:

more than 512MB of RAM, minimum. A powerful CPU possibly dual core, which are the future CPUs. A powerful graphic card to handle all the graphics of the OSs UI. At that time, if you do some calculations, todays NVIDIA 7800GTX will be todays 6600. They are already rolling out 7900 ... so at that point in time the majority of us will be having 7800s or something similar which will cost far less.

These are my thoughts, does it make sense to you? IMO it does hehe

Daniel

[Alan]

What it means Daniel is that rather than trying to load it on an old pc, it would be better to buy a new pc with it installed, but you should be careful not to buy a new machine that just meets the minimum requirements or something like that.