Vista Hardware

Culled mostly from the MAY 2006 issue of ComputerPowerUser, their Vista article is in 3 sections, and is about 15 pages long. A nice in-depth look at what to expect from MS this time around. But my purpose here is to give you a Sneak Peek at what hardware you will want, to ..mmmmmm.... enjoy your Vista experience.

They ran Vista Ultimate Edition - Build 5308, on what they call a "moderately powerful system" < Asus A8N32-SLI Deluxe mobo, with an Athlon64 4000+ cpu, 1gig Corsair PC3200 ram, a nVidia GeForce 6800 Ultra video card, and a Western Digital Raptor 74gig SATA hard drive >, with decent results. Just some minor "beta bug" complaints.

While MS is still kind of vague on the Official Requirements, < modern CPU; 512 megs ram or more; video card with DirectX 9.0 and WDDM support >, if you have XP running, you can probably get one of the nine versions of Vista on your system.
And anything built in the last year or two, should not have a problem.
It must be true, they say so right here

Modern CPU

As Gomer used to say: "Surprise!.. Surprise!.. Surprise!"

AMD says...
For desktops:
Athlon64/FX/X2, 64bit-Semprons, and the Opteron cpus.

For systems TO-GO:
Turion64/64 X2, and Mobile Sempron.

INTEL says...
For desktops:
P4 with Hyper-Threading, Pentium D and Celerons.

For systems TO-GO:
Pentium M, Celeron M, Core Solo/Duo.

The Pundits say...
A single core cpu will do OK if you tend to only do one thing at a time, but with the next-generation OS's and Apps being geared to multithreading, you are going to want a fast P4 with HT, at least; and preferably a dual-core (or more) to keep Vista from getting spanked by a 486 running Win 3.11.

512megs ram or more

Make that heavy on the more.
A clean install of Vista Ultimate Edition - Build 5308, ate about 350megs of ram and 7gigs of hard drive space. It had 38 processes running in the background, with 524 threads.
While 512megs will let you get a little work done, mostly it is just good for staring at your screen and saying: "Oooooo... look how pretty it is!"
So figure on a minimum of 1gig if you do more than doodle around, 1.5 to 2gig if you like making your rig "break a sweat" once in awhile, and if you do video editing or just like trying to bring your system "to its knees", load it up.

Video card with DirectX 9.0 and WDDM support

This is where it get interesting. Windows has a new way to clog up your hardware. It's called:
The 3-D User Interface.
Yep. Not content to let the Games have all the fun with the new video cards, MS decided that eating CPU cycles and RAM, wasn't enough.
Without AERO, the User Interface has a XP style appearance. You will still need a card with 64megs of onboard memory, and a DirectX 9.0 class GPU.
When ENABLED (with the proper hardware and drivers), AERO is a fully accelerated 3-D User Interface. With fluid animations, transparencies, support for DRM (as it applies to HD video playback), and WDDM support (Windows Display Driver Model) < Don't ask me! I was scared to look into it, but I did see a comment that the tester was pleasantly surprised to find the nVidia 6800 Vista driver was only a 3.5MB download, compared to the over 20MB XP driver download. So who knows, this might be a "silver lining", everyone is always talking about >, the Nvidia GeForce FX-class, or ATI Radeon 9500-class video card, with 128MB frame buffers, is a realistic minimum requirement. And with overall video performance, and high-resolutions performance, being heavily dependant on video memory; a Radeon X800 series, or a GeForce 6xxx series video card with 265MB frame buffers, or better, will help further reduce the urge to wipe Redmond off the map.

Storage

With the OS doing major damage to a 10gig chunk of drive space, and with more focus on digital image processing, multimedia stuff, and better back-up options, they suggest a SATA drive with 8megs of cache, 7,200rpm spindle speed, and NCQ support. But with an ATA-100/133 PATA harddrive, you probably will not see that much of a performance drop, since SATA is not even straining the the 1.5gig bus, yet.
The OS also supports the new HHD (Hybrid Hard Drive) technology. That's a hard drive with non-volatile flash memory, used to store bootup info, hibernate/resume data, and other useful info. These will be on mobile system to start with, but should get to the desktop system before too long.

Networking

Claiming that Vista is "designed with a full suite of networking and connectivity options", there is native support for most all current wired and wireless ethernet controllers in use today. So figure 100Mb as the minimum, and a Gigabit pipeline the way to go.

Version madness

The best I can figure out, as of this writing, there are nine versions to pick and choose from.
OK, so most people will need to pick between two or three, depending on their needs. This is what I have so far, with a short description of when you will need it.

Consumer releases:
Vista Starter - shipped on low-end, limited-market systems. No Aero support. Not Retail.
Vista Home Basic - Limited "Bells and Whistles" for older or lower-end hardware system, in a single PC setup. Basic MultiMedia support. No Aero support.
Vista Home Premium - Lots of "Bells and Whistles". Beefed-up MultiMedia and Networking support. 3-D Aero GUI (Graphic User Interface) support. Most likely choice if you need your system for media center use, home networking, and/or laptop use.
Vista Ultimate - Full blown Bloatware. Everything from every other version, including the Networking and Security functions of Vista Enterprise. Also has tweaks for online gaming, and exclusive "Ultimate only" apps.

Business releases:
Vista Business - SOHO (Small Office-Home Office) to mid-sized businesses, and low cost new systems.
Vista Enterprise - Big business IT, with a need for all that network, storage, and security stuff. Requires an MS volume licensing agreement.

And these:
Three European-only version, of which that is all I know about them.

That's all for now

There is plenty more, but it is mostly about the Aero GUI tricks, and what kind of software problems there may or may not be. It is worth mentioning here, that Vista will Not support old, 16-bit software apps natively, and your AV, Firewall, and anything else that hooks directly into the OS (like device drivers or disk utilities) will need to be updated, before they will work. You can keep a eye on the Microsoft's Windows Marketplace Tested Products List , to find out about software as it becomes certified for Vista.