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Microsoft Releases Vista Hardware Requirements

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the i-know-you've-been-waiting-with-baited-breath dept.

Digital Inspiration writes "CNet reports that Microsoft has kicked off a 'Get Ready' campaign aimed at helping customers prepare for Windows Vista. The site also includes an Upgrade Advisor tool to help people determine just how Vista-ready an existing PC is." From the article: "The marketing programs and upgrade tool are designed to ease some of the uncertainty around Vista well ahead of the back-to-school and holiday shopping seasons, the two biggest PC selling times of the year. Vista had long been expected to arrive by the 2006 holidays, but Microsoft said in March that it would not arrive on store shelves until January."

17 of 591 comments (clear)

  1. Bah! by Whiney+Mac+Fanboy · · Score: 5, Interesting
    From tfa:
    Premium Ready [aero, etc ready -wmf] machines need a 1GHz processor, 128MB of graphics memory, 1GB of system memory, a 40GB hard drive and an internal or external DVD-ROM drive.
    I run os x on my early g3/250 powerbook (with 160MB ram) and linux on an old 90mhz pentium classic (w/128MB).

    On both, things run perfectly, with all gui features, XGL, aqua effects, etc etc.

    (ducks!)

    Seriously - 1GB ram (512MB for low end installs) seems like an awful lot to me....
    --
    There are shills on slashdot. Apparently, I'm one of them.
    1. Re:Bah! by alx5000 · · Score: 5, Interesting

      What makes me jump is the HDD requirements.... 40 GB total and 15 GB free? Are they kidding??

      My current Windows folder uses 1.53 GB and is installed in a 6GB partition... Is there such a jump here as to justify so much HDD hunger? What will it be used for? Swap memory? Fonts??

      So this thing is gonna drain up my graphic card while it's eating my hard disk? No thanks. I'll stick with XP (If only I could go back to 98....)

      --
      My 0.02 cents
    2. Re:Bah! by Serapth · · Score: 4, Interesting

      Seriously - 1GB ram (512MB for low end installs) seems like an awful lot to me.... For whatever reason Microsoft is high-balling these figures. I ran Vista on my rather standard laptop ( Amd 64 3ghz, 1gig, craptastic nvidia card and a 5400rpm hard drive ) and to be honest, it was snappier on that machine then it was on the XP install it replaced. This was a few months back, so I have to (hope) the performace has improved since.

      Seriously, you turn off all the new eye candy(which you can do) and I believe Vista outperforms XP in most cases. The TinFoil hat wearing part of me almost wonders if part of this is simply a deal Microsoft has struck with OEMs like Dell. The higher the system requirements appear to be, the more likely a user is to buy a new PC. If the user buys a new PC Microsoft makes another OEM Vista license sale. Win - Win... well except the consumer that is.

    3. Re:Bah! by Vancorps · · Score: 5, Interesting
      Sounds like you should read more closely. Those are specs for all features turned on and are the recommended configuration. Vista already works on much less hardware than that.

      Interestingly enough I know that Vista works on processors much slower than 800mhz so I imagine there is quite a bit of padding in there. With minimal effort I can setup a responsive Vista box with less than 512megs of ram. MS is just playing it safe here saying that people with these specs will be happy with the performance out of the box. People with less will have to tweak to get themselves where they want to be. Like me running XP on a 400mhz P2 with 64megs of ram. Sucked out of the box, but I got it fairly responsive in short order. System profiling is a good thing, if you have a slow machine automatically shut off the stuff that isn't needed. That is one good feature with Vista. Not perfect since the other stuff shouldn't be running anyways but its a desktop OS so its intended to be as friendly as possible out of the box which means leaving a lot of stuff running.

      As for your other examples, let's see you run the latest release of KDE with all the bells and whistles on a Pentium 90. Not gonna happen, not even close. The OS X comparison at least compares OSes with similar graphics capabilities.

      We'll grant OS X is more efficient though Vista does quite a bit more in terms of management and monitoring so the comparison is still a little off.

    4. Re:Bah! by maynard · · Score: 4, Interesting

      That Sun 3/50 had a megapixel display. And a Sun3/60 with a CG24 card could handle megapixel in 24 bit color. Resolution was 1152x900, BTW. Though for one running a 3/60 with a cg24 card should up the RAM to 16MB. As for the rest of the stuff, Gnome et all, many old-timers consider that extra cruft a waste of RAM. X ran just fine in what most today would consider ridiculously low RAM space.

      Note that in 1988ish the common ram chip on the market was still the 256Kb (8 for 256KB) 41256. 1Mb RAM chips were still new and expensive. To get 8MB of ram in one of these systems meant 64 1Mb RAM chips, all of which consumed power. A lot of power. And a lot of money.

      You're just spoiled. :)

    5. Re:Bah! by smellsofbikes · · Score: 2, Interesting

      I'd bet the hard drive requirements are to place it safely in the NTFS realm, because if people keep formatting their installation drives with FAT32 it makes it much easier for them to build dual-boot machines.

      --
      Nostalgia's not what it used to be.
  2. OOHHH!!!! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0, Interesting

    That's assuming that it ever comes out!!!!

  3. Ummm... by xeon4life · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Is it just me, or is having stringent hardware requirements for the OPERATING SYSTEM kind of ridiculous?

    --
    Real programmers can write assembly code in any language. -- Larry Wall
    1. Re:Ummm... by entrylevel · · Score: 2, Interesting

      "Yeah, my PC is too shit to run this" (or of course the reverse)

      "This run to shit too is PC my, yeah"

      In reverse it says the exact same thing, only with worse grammar!

      (Even scarier, I know exactly what you meant.)

      For everyone that says Vista is not a hog, riddle me this:

      My workstation is an Athlon XP 2500+ w/2GB of RAM and approx 750GB of storage in SATA drives. Not state of the art by anyone's book, but a beefy machine nonetheless that does everything I need fast enough.

      I installed Vista build 5365 in VMware WS 5.5 and gave it a 16GB drive and 512MB of RAM. I turned off all the eye candy, nothing else was running on my machine. Opening a My Computer window in Vista Explorer takes roughly 7-15 seconds. Every. Single. Time. Every time you navigate to another folder, it does the same thing, even if there is nothing in the folder. It is using 100% CPU on both the virtual and real machine while doing this. Most 3rd party Windows apps seem to run at the exact same level of performance on Vista as on XP.

      I seem to remember the last build I tried doing the same thing, only not quite as bad. Is this a bug in this build/other builds? Is it related to VMware? Should I try it with a larger HD image size (there's at least 4GB free)? Is there something else I'm missing? Is Vista just a total hog?

      I think the performance rating control panel gave the virtual machine a 2.8 overall, which isn't good, but for a barebones setup with everything non-essential turned off, one would expect to be able to open a file browser without feeling inclined to go for a coffee break.

      Everything from Windows 3.1 through Ubuntu 5.10 runs silky smooth in VMware on my machine. All installations are pretty much the standard install with VMware tools installed.

      I'm no Microsoft fan, but Windows XP is pretty damn solid once you've invested the requisite 2 weeks tweaking and hardening it. Still can't multitask for crap, but for one thing at a time it's fast and stable. Vista doesn't seem even remotely as "flexible".

      Does anyone else sense that Vista could be the most catastrophic Windows release ever?

      --
      Karma: Incomprehensible (Mostly affected by posting at +5, reading at -1, and metamoderating everything unfair.)
    2. Re:Ummm... by RzUpAnmsCwrds · · Score: 2, Interesting

      I installed Vista build 5365 in VMware WS 5.5 and gave it a 16GB drive and 512MB of RAM. I turned off all the eye candy, nothing else was running on my machine. Opening a My Computer window in Vista Explorer takes roughly 7-15 seconds. Every. Single. Time

      I wonder where you got 5365, because I seriously doubt that you're a Connect member (Microsoft's beta program).

      I have run nearly every Longhorn / Vista build that was released on Connect for over a year, on both my desktop (Athlon 64 2800+ / 1GB DDR / GeForce 6600) and my laptop (Pentium-M 1.73GHz / 768MB DDR / GeForce Go 6400), and I can tell you - My Computer (which doesn't exist in Vista - it's now just "Computer") opens as fast as it does on XP, even with the eyecandy turned on.

      You installed what I suspect is a pirated build of a beta-OS on a virtual machine, and you were surprised when something didn't work right. Hell, 5365 isn't even a CTP! Your comment is akin to complaining that a nightly Firefox build is full of bugs - of course it is!

  4. not gonna work - should give out coupons instead by shr3k · · Score: 5, Interesting

    How many people will buy Vista-ready PC's but not actually bother to buy it when it comes out? Too many. Non-technical types who make up a good number of Windows users will not bother to upgrade past what they get with their computer at purchase time.

    Unless MS bundle coupons for Vista with Windows XP this buying season, they can forget about people making any effort to do buy it and do the upgrade.

  5. You mean I can't run Vista on my toaster?!?!@!@$ by gasmonso · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Come on people, Vista was not meant to be run on a wristwatch, toaster, calculator, or anything similar. The minimum requirements are on par with what any person who would want Vista in the first place would have. Seriously, if you're using a PII-350, you're just not using it for anything that would require Vista anyways. Am I nutz?

    http://religiousfreaks.com/
  6. Upgrade Advisor itself requires... by abb3w · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Windows XP to run, and won't install on Windows 2K systems. Hrmmmm. How helpful.

    --
    //Information does not want to be free; it wants to breed.
  7. Hdd requirements by Paralizer · · Score: 1, Interesting
    So 1GHz isn't that bad, 128MB of video RAM is just ridiculous for a desktop (but we've all ranted about that forever now), but I think the most interesting thing about the released specifications is the enormous hard drive requirements.
    40 GB of hard drive capacity with 15 GB free space.
    I mean, come on, how big is this thing? It's not bad enough that it kills system resources at idle but it has to fill my disk drive limiting the amount of 3rd party data also? As I recall Windows XP (which was also fairly bloated) installed around 1.2GB. Geesh...
  8. Re:Tools Still in Beta by maynard · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Theoretically one should be able to boot Windows Vista on a 500 Kilohertz PDP-11 with 8KW of wire-mesh core and a hacked MMU that supported real paging. I suppose to ease porting one might want to write an x86 emulator though. It would be an interesting proof of concept: I got Windows to boot on my PDP-11! heh.

  9. New NIC too by Skiron · · Score: 2, Interesting

    You will need at least a 1GB NIC also to allow the worms/spam and trojans to be more efficient.

    On a side note, does the spinning hourglass speed up (i.e. rotations, not time...) when it decides to bomb out?

  10. Re:No I think the main reason by billcopc · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Things haven't changed all that much, except multiply all the requirements by 32. People are still buying machines with 128 or 256mb of ram, loading XP with a bunch of resident apps and praising how their 3.8ghz P4 is so much faster than the 2.66 celeron it replaced.

    Then they come over to my place for the evening, poke around my 2.4ghz AMD with 4gb ram and then fail to understand how a 2.4ghz AMD can be faster than the latest and greatest Intel. If their P4 had 4gb of ram, hell even one gig would be comfy, they would probably give my X2-4800 a good run for the money.

    There has been too much media emphasis on clock speeds and large hard-disk caches, and too little on achieving a balanced system. Who gives a crap that the latest hard drives sport 16mb of cache if all your PC ever does is swap ? :P

    --
    -Billco, Fnarg.com