Microsoft Unveils 'Vista Premium' Requirements

Graeme writes "Microsoft has finished what some are calling the true minimum requirements for Windows Vista: the finalized requirements for the 'Vista Premium' certification program. The program is used to influence OEM designs, and it gives an idea of what Microsoft thinks Vista really needs to run well, and what they think is in the horizon. The Ars report hits the highlights, and there are some surprises in there, such as a delayed requirement for HDCP. Ars suspects that the slow ramp-up is due to the pact to not use the Image Constraint Token."

Comments

You can see where they're going

[Opportunist]

Is it me, or does this have "DRM'ed Media PC" written all over? Hickup free HD playback, PVP, DVI-D... Yes, by 2007, but, snide comments about the real release date of Vista aside, it pretty much means "Do it now, so you save yourself from refitting it later".

I certainly forsee computer sales in the first quarter of 2007, when the vendors try to get rid of their soon-to-be not-compatible hardware.

It's also noteworthy that Vista requires OEMs to have some kind of networking ability. While this is a given by today's standards, I find it very curious that an operating system REQUIRES me to have it.

"plenty"?

[Bill Dog]

The 1Ghz CPU and 1GB RAM and DirectX 9 graphics is understandable, but what exactly does "plenty" of video RAM mean? For the full-blown Aero "experience" do I need 512 or 256 or 1024 or what?

Basic Question No One Has Asked

[Master of Transhuman]

The public Beta is out. Anybody actually TRIED running this AND applications on the barebones spec of 800MHz and 512MB of RAM as well as the 1GHz CPU and 1GB of RAM?

By apps, I mean the current version of Microsoft Office with Word and Excel open at the same time, and the IE browser open, and maybe Messenger, and the usual tray full of crap most people run.

I want to hear a REAL-WORLD test from the people using the public Beta on REAL machines.

I find it hard to believe that everybody INCLUDING MICROSOFT was talking about 3GHz machines and 1GB of RAM at a minimum last year, and now suddenly we're down to 800MHz CPUs?

What's wrong with this picture? Don't blame it on the media because Microsoft ITSELF was talking those specs last year.

Re:Basic Question No One Has Asked

[ThinkFr33ly]

Yes, kinda.

I've been running beta 2 on an Athlon 1.2Ghz / 512MB / Radeon 9800 128MB setup. I would consider this pretty much bare bones.

How does it run? Well, considering it uses about 800 MB of ram just sitting there, suprisingly well. This memory usage is almost certainly due to the fact it's a beta. I remember beta 2 of XP used like 600 MB of ram just sitting there.

But given the fact that on XP if you're using that much more ram than you have you'd be swapping like crazy, Vista runs suprisingly smoothly. I rarely notice UI lag, even when opening up new applications. In fact, the UI lag on Vista beta 2 is better than on my primary desktop running XP. (My primary desktop has 2 GB of ram, and a 3.8 Ghz P4.)

The Vista search features are very fast as well.

Of course, the iffy specs of my test machine cause some things to be painfully slow. Opening an explorer folder with hundreds of videos in it will takes a very long time to render all the previews. (The folder itself, however, comes up almost instantly.)

Assuming they cut the memory requirements by 50% post beta (which is close to what we saw with XP), Vista would run just fine for "normal" use on that old Athlon. No games, probably no coding, etc.

The OS is five years old

[darthservo]

Another point about XP that a coworker and I were discussing this earlier today: We found ourselves surprised by the fact that XP is currently five years old, and will be nearing six when Vista is released.

For the past five years, most of the MS crowd here have been using XP (except for those who have their feet firmly rooted in the 2k GUI). That's really amazing when pausing to think about it. Were we still using 3.1 when 98 was released? No.

In the entire time I've used XP on my personal computers, I've found it to be a stable and reliable OS, especially for that long of a timeframe. I don't think it will be too different with Vista.

Re:Haven't we been here before?

[Cal Paterson]

I'll point out one thing again you MS apoligists. Beta software is supposed to be pretty good with a couple of faults. That means a few more bugs that need to be ironed out.

People are not pissed because of a few bugs - people are pissed because the whole fucking thing is fundamentally flawed. You don't fix a crappy permission system in the time between beta and release. No one does. You don't fix the complete lack of drivers between beta and release. Ever see BSD or Linux triple the number of drivers in the time between beta and release? No. You never did.

Want to know why? Because if you have a fundamental problem in beta, it doesn't get fixed by release. As funny as it sounds, MS are not going to be making any substantial improvements to the number of drivers between now and release. The Hardware companies don't want to write them, and Microsoft don't have the documentation available.