Requirements for Windows 7

**Paul** · 21-01-2009

A few years ago, when Microsoft announced the minimum requirements for Windows Vista, I wrote a small entry comparing the requirements of the various versions of Windows. Now that Microsoft has released the beta of Windows 7, it is time to repeat it.

The recommended minimum requirements for Windows 7 are:

1GHz processor
1GB of RAM
16GB hard disk space
Graphics card with DirectX 9 support and 128MB of memory
DVD

Which come to be virtually the same as for Windows Vista, except that Vista requires 15GB of disk space.

And how does this compare with previous versions?

Windows 95 needs a 486 processor, 4MB of RAM and 50MB of disk space.
Windows 98, we required a 486 at 66MHz or higher, 16MB RAM and 195MB of disk space.
Windows ME, on the other hand, is not satisfied with nothing less than a Pentium 150MHz processor, 32MB RAM and 320MB of disk space
The operating system used today, Windows XP requires a 300MHz processor, 128MB of RAM and 1.5 GB of disk space

**Lillebror** · 21-01-2009

Platform for Intel Core i7 start of 2009 from 3GB of DDR3 ram triple channel, assuming a standard soon, and 6GB versions of the software to 64bits. I do not see that it is odd that the operating system is aligned with the hardware, in fact the minimum requirements for Windows 7 are well below that.

I have ubuntu 8.10 to 64bits in a P4 3GHz with 1GB RAM and some requests for more machines. Even I do not think it advisable not to install this on computers with 256mb distribution.

**Solomon** · 21-01-2009

Let's see in a couple of graphics. First Processor and memory:

─── Processor
─── Memory

and then, disk space:

─── Disk space

These numbers, if so, we must view with some perspective, and taking into account developments in the market for hardware.

By way of comparison you say that Ubuntu 8.10 is recommended minimum 700MHz processor, 384MB of RAM and 8GB of disk space (1.2GHz processor if we use Compiz and some complex special effects).