Hot on the tails of my mac blog- comes the windows vista specs announcement. Ironically, I stumbled upon this while reading an interesting article that relates to our last entry, ‘Is Windows On a Mac Really Drawing in New Users?‘ Perhaps so, but more on topic- For consumers who would like to know if their current system has what it takes to run Windows Vista, you can go to Microsoft’s Windows Vista “Get Ready” website and run the Windows Vista Upgrade Advisor. And also keep in mind that these are Microsoft’s minimum requirements for compliance with Windows Vista. Running a system with the bare minimum is far from optimum for such a new operating system. I wouldn’t be surprised if a 2.0GHz and 2GB of RAM is the true “sweet spot” for Vista, as industry insiders have already claimed.

To be qualified as a Vista Premium Ready PC, a 1GHz x86 or x86-64 processor is required along with at least 1GB of RAM. In order to run the Aero Glass user interface in all its glory, you’ll need a DirectX 9-class graphics card which supports the Windows Display Driver Model (WDDM). Microsoft goes further and stipulates these requirements for running Aero Glass on Vista:

• Pixel Shader 2.0 in hardware
• 32 bits per pixel
• 64 MB of graphics memory to support a single monitor less than 1,310,720 pixels
• 128 MB of graphics memory to support a single monitor at resolutions from 1,310,720 to 2,304,000 pixels
• 256 MB of graphics memory to support a single monitor at resolutions higher than 2,304,000 pixels

Filed under: Geek