Windows 7 is the next Operating System release from Microsoft. I’m using it on my working laptop since Microsoft made available Windows 7 beta for download, and so far I have nothing but praise about the OS. I’m pretty sure the official public release will be much better than the beta version. so, you might be wondering what are the requirements to run Windows 7 with full features? is it a hog resource like Vista? not quite. I installed Windows Vista on this the same laptop and I had to uninstall it because it was too slow and not compatible with many essential applications I use at work. I haven’t had any compatibility issue with Windows 7, and Windows 7 is much quicker than Vista or XP, or so it seems. the hardware on my laptop is as follow:
The video card is Mobile Intel(R) 945 Express Chipset Family which supports the DX9 graphics for the aero candy look stuff. I have a CD/DVD RW which is required for the installation of windows 7 DVD.
as you can see, my hardware is not very powerful, in fact this laptop is more than 2 years old, laptops today are built with better hardware to support the new OSs resource demand. but what’s the minimum requirements to run Windows 7? the official requirements for Windows 7 are:
- 1GHz processor (32- or 64-bit)
- 1GB of memory
- 16GB of available disk space
- Support for DX9 graphics with 128MB of memory (for the Aero interface)
- A DVD-R/W drive
These are basically the minimum requirements to run Windows vista, but I believe you should be able to run Windows 7 on less powerful hardware. probably you won’t be able to run the sleek look on Windows aero, but windows should perform just fine on:
- 1 GHz processor
- 512 MB of Memory
- 15GB of Hard drive space – if you disable the system protection and system restore on the computer you should be able to run windows 7 on a smaller hard drive.
well, the only big difference there is memory, I believe Windows 7 can be ran comfortably with 512 MB of memory.
what do you think?
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