Microsoft Announces Vista Hardware Requirements

[Tyler]

"Vista will run on just about any modern computer released in the past few years. An 800MHz processor coupled with 512MB of RAM is the bare minimum for running Vista. You won't get all of the fancy graphical enhancements and you most likely won't have a very pleasant experience performance wise either. For me, it's bad enough running a Windows XP system with a lot of windows open that is "crippled" with just 512MB of RAM (between Photoshop, FireFox and its memory leaks and the countless other programs I run), so I couldn't imagine limping around on Vista with only 512MB."

Read more here. And/or check out Microsoft's new Vista "Get Ready" website.

[Jason425]

Interesting... a majority of the computers at my work have 256mb of ram... doubt we'll be going to vista for a while...

[Slashmire]

Yes, I've read those articles, and they are quite interesting, I actually thought the requirements would be higher. A good thing to note about Ram is that 32 bits system had a limit of 2^32 of Ram (4 Gigs) while 64 bits system allows 2^64 (oh...just calculate that one yourself.)

Of course that may not all fit in a computer RAM slot