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Requirements for Vista

By Justin Mann

On September 6, 2005, 7:42 PM

It's already been widely known that Vista would require a beefier system than ever before, much more than the progress of technology would predict. Microsoft has in the past spoken to vendors about not using onboard video in the future because of the demands Vista will put on the GPU with its native use of 3D acceleration. The official specs are out now, and the systems needed are pretty much in-line with what a brand new enthusiast/performance computer is going to be today, but it may cause some headache for those of you looking to upgrade in the next year or so. My fastest system meets those specs, albeit barely, and it was built just a few months ago. The article mentions how having a dual-core system will give considerable boosts to performance. The suggested video card will have 256mb of VRAM or more, and a whopping 2GB of system memory! The requirements are far less, with a 64mb video card with a quarter of the RAM will suffice. Then again, the system requirements for Windows XP are 64mb of RAM. Is this upgrade worth it?

You can see for yourself. The beta 1 of Windows Vista is available for download from Microsofts site, easy for Technet members with Microsofts tool. You can also have it mailed to you for a fee.

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  1. September 7, 2005 1:22 PM
    spike said:
    Nice to see that M$ feel that computing should only be the pastime of the rich. I'd have no arguement with any of it - if they were talking about releasing Vista when hardware like this would be common.
    Reply
  2. September 7, 2005 2:18 PM
    Phantasm66 said:
    I remember when Windows 95 came out, and people tried to run it on their 486s. They moaned about how slow it was. Then they moaned some more. Then some more. Then they bought new machines.
    Reply
  3. September 7, 2005 3:16 PM
    spike said:
    If I'm honest, I wasn't around back then as an adult. I certainly didn't have my own computer.I guess at the end of the day takeup of Vista will be slow to start with anyway - many tend to wait untill the bus are ironed out of a new OS, especially after the win98 saga. It's possible thatby the time Vista enjoys the popularity that XP does right now, I might have the hardware to run it anyway
    Reply

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