I think the article itself is a bit confusing:
In the begin of the article it says:
Nigel Page is a strategist with Microsoft Australia. He told APC today that Vista would work best on a video card with more than 256MB RAM, 2GB of DDR3 memory and a S-ATA 2 hard drive.
But this is only the specs you need to run it
the best way...
later on it says:
- "In a 32 bit environment, half a gig of RAM is heaps. It's going to fly. For 64 bit you're going to want 2 gigs of DDR3 RAM.
- "If you move from 32 to 64 bit, you basically need to at least double your memory. 2 gigs in 64 bit is the equivalent of a gig of RAM on a 32bit machine. That's because you're dealing with chunks that are twice the size… if you try to make do with what you've got you'll see less performance. But RAM is now so cheap, it's hardly an issue.
- "In terms of disks, you're really going to want S-ATA 2hard drives with NCQ capability because it gives the OS the ability to get on with stuff while disk tasks complete. All the tier 1 and tier 2 vendors can provide this capability today.
- "Thirdly, the graphics card and system bus is essential. PCI x16 is going to be very important. Any of today's 3D GPUs will be fine… we're not waiting for some mystical monster that may or may not come out. But they need to have 128MB of RAM on it. If they've only got 64 don't panic.
- "We acknowledge that many corporate notebooks have fairly low-end integrated graphics chips. They're not exactly high performance graphics systems. For those users, we will provide a classic UI that looks like XP, and then we will have Aero that will start to make use of the GPU, and then there's Aero Glass that will demand the higher level
- "We are talking a year out here, so I have no doubt the vendors will address this in that period of time.”
So they will ajust a couple of features, so that it will run on 'medium-end' pcs
But hey... Win XP doesn't work 'best' on a 800Mhz pc, but it will still run without any problems. If you want to run win xp fluently (that means almost no 'lag/waiting time' when performing certain tasks in windows) you need at least 2 ghz and preferably a fast hdd.
So I guess these hardware requirements are a bit exaggerated. It will run on pc's with lower hardware specs than stated in the article, but I guess it will run like Win XP does on a 800Mhz these days.
The only thing I wonder about is the graphics card requirements. Graphics are of course important because customers like a nice UI, but why the hell would we want an OS whith such a graphics that it requires a 128 mb graphics card
..
