The Hardware Requirements for Windows Vista

Although suspected by many who are holding their breath for the new Vista OS, the hardware requirements have yet to be detailed by Microsoft.

This is about to change today as the Redmond company is expected to announce all the hardware requirements for Vista.

According to News.com, there will be two marketing programs. �Vista-capable" will contain the minimum requirements for the OS, scheduled for consumer availability in January 2007. These include 800 Mhz for the CPU, 512 MB of RAM and a graphics card able to run DirectX 9.

�Premium Ready" targets the high-end features found in Vista, especially the Aero GUI. Among these, one can find 1GHz for the CPU, 1GB of RAM and graphics card with 128MB and support for the new graphics-driver model.

Aside from these two programs, the Redmond company is also expected to release a tool that tells the users which Vista version to run and what are the upgrades required in order to have access to all the features.