The Vista Low-Down... or Pretty Low

Most people have heard the news about the new Windows Vista operating system to be released in 2007. And most have probably also heard that it requires insanely top-of-the-line hardware or at least the latest and greatest of them all.

Allow me to remove that thought from you.

Ok, on this very desktop that I am typing this blog, I am running what would be considered a dinasaur of a PC. Allow me to show you:

As you see in the above picture, I have a Pentium 4 1.6 ghz proccesor (using 533 FSB) with no Hyper-Threading support, and 512 MB of DDR PC2100 RAM. My video card is also an ATI Radeon 9500 non-pro card and it fully supports AERO superbly. This computer, if you don't much about hardware, is old. It is near the end of what once was a great reign.

This reign, however, is not over. It performs rather well with Vista, including the AERO effects.

I tested out the 3d Switcher and moving between multiple windows while playing a movie, to see if the movie preview ever skipped or stuttered, and it never once skipped a frame or anything. Here's a shot of what I had done:

The closest windows is X-Men 3 playing in Windows Media Player 11

As you can see, Vista does not scare older hardware like many critics may have claimed. Now, I wouldn't try running it on something less than a 1 gHz CPU and anything under 512mb of RAM, but this hardware I am using will greatly suffice to Vista's needs.