Windows7How

Windows 7 Hardware Requirements

October 21, 2009

The release of Windows 7 is just less than a day away, and some of you might already get their  hands on the new OS. Let’s take a last look at Win7 system requirements. Often, hardware requirements for any Operating System (OS) are no mystery. However, they are very important to anyone who wants to install or upgrade an OS. With Windows Vista, some people ignored – or did not take seriously – the memory requirements which Microsoft published. They were greeted with many issues and constant crashes until the PCs were properly configured. In an effort to make their new OS version easier for the public and businesses to stomach, Microsoft has listed relatively modest hardware requirements for Windows 7, which is due out later this year.

For Windows 7, any PC on which it will be installed will require the following:

• 1 GHz or faster 32-bit (x86) or 64-bit (x64) processor
• 1 GB of RAM (32-bit)/2 GB of RAM (64-bit)
• 16 GB of available disk space (32-bit)/20 GB (64-bit)
• DirectX 9 graphics device with Windows Display Driver Model 1.0 or higher driver

The only remaining question involves whether the different SKUs – or versions – of Windows 7 will have different requirements (i.e. will Windows 7 Ultimate Edition have higher memory requirements versus Windows 7 Starter Edition). Microsoft says that the above list is the ‘final’ list, but we may have to wait until full release to know for sure.

One important caveat is the new Windows XP Mode – a virtualization engine – will need a full 2GB of RAM, minimum, and 15GB of additional hard drive space.

It has been many versions of Windows operating systems since we saw a new release which will be faster than the previous version on virtually the same hardware. Windows 7 should fulfill that purpose very well given what we see here. After all, the system requirements are not that much more than what Vista required – a rare situation, indeed.

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Tags: hard drive space, hardware, intel, os, requirements, virtualization, vista, win7, xp mode