In a press release issued late last month, Microsoft revealed that their upcoming OS, Windows Vista, would be released in November for businesses and in Spring 2007 for consumers. It was originally believed that Vista would ship for consumers by at least holidays 2006, though that is now not possible. It’s interesting to see that Microsoft’s corporate customers would receive Vista before consumers, as businesses are usually the last to adopt new software/hardware systems.
Vista has been plagued by delays, so this isn’t really too much of a surprise. It may be good that they did delay it, as this means more time will be spent on the OS and its many features. Earlier this year, several key features of Vista had been removed in order to release it in a more timely manner, but at this point that shouldn’t be an issue any longer.
In order to reassure consumers who are looking to purchase a new PC, Microsoft has come up with the minimum hardware requirements for Vista Home (the most basic version of Vista). PC’s which meet the requirements will get a “Designed for Windows XP, Windows Vista Capable” sticker on them. So what are these requirements? Well, they’re nothing too demanding, most of you will probably easily be able to run Vista (albeit without all the fancy graphics). Here they are:
- Be able to competently run Windows XP
- A modern CPU
- A minimum of 512MB of RAM
- A DirectX 9 class graphics processor
- Optionally support Windows Display Driver Model (WDDM) to take advantage of Vista’s improved graphics
And if you do want to run Vista with all the extras (Aero, et al), you’ll need something like this:
- DirectX 9 class graphics hardware that supports WDDM and Pixel Shader 2.0
- A minimum of 32 bits per pixel
- Appropriate graphics memory for specified monitor resolutions expressed as total pixels (X dimension multiplied by Y dimension)
- Graphics memory bandwidth, as assessed by Windows Vista’s built in system assessment tool WinSAT.EXE, of at least 1,800MB/s at 1,310,720 pixels on a desktop and at the native resolution on a mobile PC
This is definitely a smart move on Microsoft’s part, as when the time comes, and users begin to hear about Vista, they’ll be able to easily upgrade. This will also prevent users from waiting to buy a new PC, as they can get one right now, one which will run Vista.
While Vista is looking very nice and boasts a lot of new features, I’m content with Windows XP for the moment, and can wait until it’s released.
