Lost Opportunity? Windows 10 Has the Same Minimum PC Requirements As Vista

MojoKid writes Buried in the details of Microsoft's technical preview for Windows 10 is a bit of a footnote concerning the operating system's requirements. Windows 10 will have exactly the same requirements as Windows 8.1, which had the same requirements as Windows 8, which stuck to Windows 7 specs, which was the same as Windows Vista. At this point, it's something we take for granted with future Windows release. As the years roll by, you can't help wondering what we're actually giving up in exchange for holding the minimum system spec at a single-core 1GHz, 32-bit chip with just 1GB of RAM. The average smartphone is more powerful than this these days. For decades, the standard argument has been that Microsoft had to continue supporting ancient operating systems and old configurations, ignoring the fact that the company did its most cutting-edge work when it was willing to kill off its previous products in fairly short order. what would Windows look like if Microsoft at least mandated a dual-core product? What if DX10 — a feature set that virtually every video card today supports, according to Valve's Steam Hardware Survey, became the minimum standard, at least on the x86 side of the equation? How much better might the final product be if Microsoft put less effort into validating ancient hardware and kicked those specs upwards, just a notch or two? If Microsoft did raise the specs a notch or two with each release, I think there'd be some justified complaints about failing to leave well enough alone, at least on the low end.

Comments

What have they held up?

[nine-times]

Before we go any further, I think it'd be good to provide an example of what feature you believe Microsoft has failed to implement in order to keep the requirements low. I can't think of what that would be. Because failing the need to meet some specific requirement, I don't know why system requirements should need to keep going up, especially when you consider that we use our desktop/laptop computers for the same things as we did 10 years ago. Web browsing, word processing, spreadsheets. For games, you can support weaker/older systems and just scale the graphics down.

So unless there's a specific feature that would suck up resources, I'd actually kind of expect that an OS system requirements might go down. As code continues to be optimized, you'd get better performance on the same hardware. Of course, there's a limit to that. But why complain that the OS isn't an ever-bloating resource hog?