Vista is a Hardware Beast

I had to chuckle a bit when I saw the hardware requirements for Windows Vista. The only req that seems reasonable to me is the 1GB of RAM for 32bit machines (it's 2GB for 64bit). Let's take a quick look at the others. While 256M of RAM in a video card is not outrageous these days (some already have 1G, although they aren't cheap) it seems like an awfully high bar for a minimum. This is due to the change from using the CPU to display bitmaps on the screen to using the GPU to render vectors. This alone will make a whole lot of computers fall short. They'd also like to see a PCI-Express video card, not the much more common AGP. Next is the RAM – they'd like to see DDR3. I don't even think this is shipping yet, and the roadmap looks like 2007 is the target date for mass adoption. Nice! The next one is SATA2. While SATA2 is nice (it supports Native Command Queueing), but certainly not the standard in machines today. So, we've already eliminated almost everyones machine so far, right? Now for the kicker. No current TFT monitor out there is going to support high definition playback in Vista. That's right – NONE. To play HD-DVD or Blu-Ray content you'll need a HDCP compatible monitor. The bottom line? If you'd like to upgrade to Vista, you'll probably need a whole new machine – including monitor. It almost seems like Microsoft is forcing you into buying a new computer. Is this their payback to the Dell's of the world for all the abuse they've been given? Seems coincidental, that's for sure. This has to be good news for Linux, which will not have any of these lofty prereq's, I'm quite sure. Hopefully Linux vendors will take advantage of this.
–jeremy
Microsoft, Vista, Linux