Windows Vista: Versions and System Requirements

The new Windows will hit the market in as many as five versions, three for home users (Vista Ultimate, Vista Home Premium and Vista Home Basic) and two for corporate users (Vista Enterprise and Vista Business). These versions will differ in their capabilities scope. Particularly, the simplest version Vista Home Basic will even lack the new Aero interface and some multimedia functions.

Vista Home Premium is mainly targeted at the home user who is interested in viewing and processing multimedia content and in playing games. The Enterprise and Business versions, as their names suggest, are meant for corporate environments. They lack a number of multimedia capabilities, but offer those features that are needed by the corporate user like enhanced security, file system encryption, support for smart cards, enhanced support of faxes, scanners, etc.

It is the Ultimate Edition that will boast the widest functionality, embracing all the features of other Windows Vista versions. This version will suit ideally for those users who are going to use one PC for both work and play and it is this version that was made available for download as part of Microsoft’s customer preview program we’ve mentioned above. Each version of Windows Vista exists in 32-bit and 64-bit flavors, but we chose the 64-bit one as the future-oriented one. An ISO image of the 64-bit version of Windows Vista Beta 2 Ultimate weighs 4.2GB (the image of the 32-bit version is smaller at 3.2GB) – the new OS will obviously be shipped on a DVD. Its installation files have a much larger total size than the files of Windows XP that used to fit easily on one CD.

According to Microsoft, a computer must meet the following hardware requirements to be touted as a Windows Vista Capable PC:

• CPU with a clock rate of 800MHz or higher
• 512MB of system RAM
• DirectX 9-compatible graphics card

This hardware configuration will only suffice for the basic functionality of the new OS. To have the status of a Windows Vista Premium Ready PC, the computer must have the following:

• CPU with a clock rate of 1GHz and higher
• 1GB of system RAM
• Graphics card compatible with the Aero interface
• HDD with a storage capacity of at least 40GB and with 15GB of free space
• DVD-ROM
• Audio subsystem
• Internet access

What is an Aero-compatible graphics card? Microsoft defines it as a graphics card that has WDDM drivers (Windows Display Driver Model, earlier known as LDDM or Longhorn Display Driver Model), provides hardware support for version 2.0 pixel shaders, and supports a color depth of 32 bits per pixel. You also need at least 128MB of graphics memory with a memory bandwidth of 1.8GB/s and higher to enable resolutions above 1280x1024. So, there is no cause for worrying – an overwhelming majority of today’s graphics cards meet these requirements.

The amount of system RAM is a tricky issue. It seems that PC gamers will have to install at least 2 gigabytes of memory to use Windows Vista with comfort (the 64-bit version of Vista Home Basic supports up to 8GB of system memory while the more advanced versions of the new OS put almost no limitations on the amount of memory you can use). The 32-bit versions are limited by the scope of 32-bit addressing, but even they support 4GB of RAM and, unlike in Windows XP, applications can use all of that amount. Apart from games, 1 gigabyte should be quite enough for comfortable work in the Vista environment. For simple office work like typing and editing text, even 512MB of system RAM may be enough.

The rest of the requirements are obvious and provoke no questions.