Saturday, May 9, 2009

Windows 7 Minimal Requirements Released

Along with the release of the Windows 7 release candidate came new system requirements for Microsoft's next operating system. This updated set of requirements has been declared final, making them the official system requirements for Windows 7 final. Seeing Microsoft's rather... Dubious past dealings with minimum system requirements, let's take a look at Windows 7's.

The updated requirements have changed little since the Windows 7 beta, and they are almost identical to those of Windows Vista - but when Windows 7 is released, we will be three years down the road. Without further ado:

  • 1 GHz processor (32- or 64-bit)
  • 1 GB of RAM (32-bit); 2 GB of RAM (64-bit)
  • 16 GB of available disk space (32-bit); 20 GB of available disk space (64-bit)
  • DirectX 9 graphics device with WDDM 1.0 or higher driver

My AMD Phenom X4 quad-core (4x2.2Ghz), with on-board Radeon HD3200 graphics and 4GB of Geil RAM obviously runs Windows 7 RC (32bit) blazingly fast.

The only machine where it could've gotten interesting is my Aspire One netbook, which has the well-known Atom 1.6Ghz processor with an on-board Intel-something video chip and 1.5GB of RAM. Sorry to disappoint some of you, but this netbook has no problems running Windows 7 RC either.

Then again, none of these three machines had any troubles running Windows Vista anyway (I never ran Vista on the quad-core though) so to me, there's really no surprise there. I have already accepted that my apartment is a magical Windows-problem-free zone inhabited by fairies who keep my machines tidy and clean at night while taking sips out of my Martini bottles.

Anyway, looking back upon the increases in system requirements for Windows, here's a nice little table I made of all the official minimum specifications as listed by Microsoft.

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Louis Mark

May 9

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