requirements

[Psionicbattousa]

Is it true that it requires 2 gb ram, 64 bit cpu (how many of those does intel have?), PCIE 128mb video card, SATA hard drive, and monitor that supports hi-def? cuz thats what was reported in the latest PC World

[Tuttle]

Nobody's entirely sure what the system requirements will be yet, but the current beta runs okay on my laptop -- Athlon XP-M 2600+, 512 MB RAM, ATI Radeon 9600 Mobility 64 MB etc. You'll need grunty hardware to get all the pretty glass effects, but Vista itself will run with a lot less.

The 64-bit CPU requirement is for Longhorn Server only. Windows Vista will have both 32- and 64-bit versions.

[Nix]

I'm guessing that they might just be thinking "to hell with it, if people want to run this OS they gotta get the goods"

The latest installment of Age Of Empires (Age Of Empires 3) will only run on Windows XP and a 64MB Memory card

Minimum System Requirements

* Microsoft® Windows® XP
* PC with 1.4 Ghz equivalent or higher processor
* 256 MB of system RAM
* 620 MB available hard disk space
* 64 MB video card with HT&L
* DirectX 9.0c or above

Which has probably either just shut a whole load people out of the market or forced people to think about upgrading.

I look at games and often think do I update my computer or just buy the game later when I have upgraded.

Doing ther latter often means the game is no longer available - or only on eBay.

I have in the past bought games and just held on to them for a couple of years until I've upgraded my PC / OS.

[phernandez]

Sorry to resurrect an old thread but was just at Interop NYC today attending a Vista/Longhorn Server session.

According to the speaker, 512 MB RAM minimum, decent 32-/64-bit modern processor (good-bye 486 and early Pentiums) and a video card with DX9 support for most if not all of Avalon's graphical bells and whistles. Plus there will be 8 versions (?!) including Vista 'N' for Europe (no embedded Windows Media).

In all, today's hardware should run it, but as always, better hardware will yield better results. Of course, a lot can change between now and this time next year. The speaker's setup was slow because he was running an old beta with tons of debug code on a virtual machine through his tablet PC. Ouch.

An interesting tidbit: MS is planning to release Longhorn server in '07 with support for up to four virtual machines on top of the base OS *standard*. Interesting...

[alc6379]

Just a heads up:

I'm running Vista CTP Beta 2 on my box:

Athlon XP 2500+
512MB PC3200 RAM
400GB hard drive space
Nvidia FX5700 128MB Optima LE AGP card

...and things are running well for me, at 1600x1200 resolution. Things could be snappier, sure, but my machine's plenty usable under Vista's current state with no hardware upgrades whatsoever.

[A31Chris]

I heard it was at least a 1.5 ghz processor to run Vista.

Anyone see anything wrong with such high specs just to run an OS? Take a game that requires 1.5 ghz and you'll need a 3ghz machine to run both the OS and the game.

[Nix]

I heard it was at least a 1.5 ghz processor to run Vista.

Anyone see anything wrong with such high specs just to run an OS? Take a game that requires 1.5 ghz and you'll need a 3ghz machine to run both the OS and the game.

Surely that's not the case.

If a game states it needs to run on a machine that is 1.5Ghz, that's the speed of the machine not an add-on to whatever you machine is already running.

[Steve R Jones]

Ditto. It never has been anyother way before. Vista won't change that.

[SuperSparks]

The latest that I've seen, and it's still fairly speculative, is a minimum of 512MB RAM, and a reasonably powerful graphics card if you want to run all the new UI features that it will have. You will be able to use a lower power card, but some of the UI features will be unavailable. I've heard that a Nvidia 6600 will be more than sufficient.