Whats a good enough hardware configuration for Windows Vista?

Software has always been hungry for hardware resources. Windows Vista is no different. A machine configuration for Windows XP may not be a good choice for running Vista. A machine with 1 GHz processor, 1 GB RAM, graphics card with onboard RAM, 80GB harddisk would be decent enough to install and run Vista.

Important point to note here is that though an OS may not need lots of hardware resources to run, but the new applications for the OS may demand much more processor speed and memory. A good test would be to run Office applications to see how you machine performs. If you see apparent degradation from how the apps worked on XP, the new machine is simply not capable enough.

Running some benchmark tools may also help in deciding about new machine requirements. I used "Windows Vista Upgrade Advisor 1.0" from Microsoft site http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=42B5AC83-C24F-4863-A389-3FFC194924F8&displaylang=en

It reported that my machine has:

• good processor (P4 2.8GHz)
• enough 1GB RAM

It reported that I should:

• Increase hard disk space (minimum 15GB free) to install Vista.
• Add a graphics card for better GUI experience (Windows Aero™ user experience)
• Add a DVD drive.