Windows 7 System Requirements

Soulzz

Soulzz

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Source: http://blogs.zdnet.com/microsoft/?p=2643

Here are the minimum Windows 7 system requirements Microsoft released on April 30 when it made available the Release Candidate to MSDN and TechNet testers:

* 1 GHz processor (32- or 64-bit)
* 1 GB of RAM (32-bit); 2 GB of RAM (64-bit)
* 16 GB of available disk space (32-bit); 20 GB of avaiable disk space (64-bit)
* DirectX 9 graphics device with WDDM 1.0 or higher driver
 
For reference, Windows Vista’s system requirements are:

1 GHz processor (32- or 64-bit)
512 MB of RAM (for Home Basic); 1 GB of RAM for all other versions
15 GB of available disk space
Support for DirectX 9 graphics and 32 MB of graphics memory (for Home Basic); 128 MB of graphics memory plus WDDM support for all other versions
 
Shit windows 7 is probably more inflated with worthless unneeded products than vista!!!!!!!!!!!
 
W7 is actually posting much better results than Vista. While I am not a fan of Vista I did install it on my new system so I could support 8gbs of ram I plan on getting in a few weeks or so. Phenom X4 2.5ghz, 4gb Gskill 1066 DDR2, 500gb WD SATA3.0gb/s, Giabyte Mobo, Thermaltake 500w PSU.
 
I saw Win7 is supposed to be released to the public on Oct. 23rd, 2009.
 
Yeah that's what's "in the air" lately I guess...

Actually I've read conflicting articles on startup/shutdown/game/application performance. One said it's no faster than vista, just "seems like it" somehow. At least the memory footprint should be a bit lower :-/

I think I'm still going to stay with XP until DX11 becomes popular and/or get more than 2GB ram or something that requires better support...
 
I've used Vista, XP, and a little Windows 7. I prefer Vista. I'm sure I'll soon prefer Windows 7 as it's the next tier up. A lot of what confuses is these sites benchmarking an OS in what seems like pre-beta. Your not going to get accurate results doing that.

As for Vista/Windows 7 requiring more RAM, isn't that suppose to happen every time you upgrade? If games like Crysis never came out, or Fallout 3, or FarCry 2, what would be the point of buying a kick ass rig on 1 GB of RAM?

Anyways, I'm tired of hearing these review sites, especially reputable once, critique Vista when I don't even see what the beef with it is. I've been using Vista for over a year now, never will go back to XP. It requires more power, of course. Microsoft made that mistake by putting XP on a close-to 6 year cycle.

|end rant|
 
I absolutely hate XP after using the Win7 beta for a few months now. Every time I boot into XP, it disgusts me all over again with its shortcomings compared to even a beta version of Win7. I agree with you Soulzz, if I had Vista I'm sure I'd never want to go back to XP either.

I don't know if you guys saw my post earlier on benchmarks, but (even though I only have the beta Win7) I have gotten any where from 2.4% faster than XP to as low as 1.7% slower than XP in benchmarks. As for actual gaming, I get about 60-70fps faster using even BF2142 on Win7. I was kind of freaked at first because I was getting 300fps in 2142-nice!
 
I thought the framerate in 2142 capped at 100? No?
 
Yes, it's capped, but it's not against game rules, meaning not a violation, to disable the cap- from everything I've read. It's a simple typed command once you're logged in, loaded up on a server and map, that disables the fps cap.
 
I guess I just have a different opinion of what version progression in software should do...

In my opinion, every new version of any software should become smaller, more optimized, more bug-free. Of course, they should implement new features to implement new hardware developments and to help better applications be written for that hardware. Then they should make those features (mostly programming API) more bug-free, optimized, smaller, requiring less resources.

I loved the development of windows up to the windows 95 release, because the actual usability in the GUI improved imo. The taskbar / system tray / start menu arrangement was THE single most amazing thing that ever happened to windows imo... and then everything started escalating downhill. Newer windows versions brought nothing really very usable (to me personally). Lately the trend seems to be to index all your shit and enable better searching (which I may use once a month, if that), and to make prettier and heavier GUIs with little benefit (which I turn off because I like faster rather than prettier). Actually, I take that back. There's ONE feature in Windows 7 that I'm actually looking forward to. ONE feature that will be useful to me for 14 years of development... and that is that you can drag windows to side-hotspots and they can attach to "half" the screen (similar to opening two windows and setting them to "tile windows vertically" using the right-click on the taskbar). For me, that's it. There is nothing implemented in the last 14 years that, to me as a user, makes windows better or easier to use (except the upcoming win7 feature I mentioned above). I might as well be using windows 95 and I will have effectively the same productivity as I do now with XP or would have had with vista.

Now, if I were a programmer, a lot has probably changed with application development underneath that I'm not seeing as an end-user... and those developments are very welcome.

I just wish somebody from microsoft would explain why the operating system itself is slower and more memory-bloated than previous versions given the same setup. Somehow I really doubt it's the improvement in API's that is causing the slowdown... and most importantly, the basic underlying OS functionality seems to me to be more or less the exact same as with windows XP.

Meh... anyway. Kind of a rant, but I'll probably end up using windows 7 eventually, not because of anything else in particular, but for the mere reason that people are going to stop writing drivers for XP sooner or later... like they did with 3.11, 95, 98, milennium edition, and 2000. The same thing happened with windows 98... I used it until the drivers for my hardware really started sucking some serious balls compared to the XP drivers. And the same tipping point will probably push me over to Win 7... seems nearer and nearer. I'm comparing the changelogs for nvidia's drivers lately between the XP and Vista improvements, and the difference is becoming larger and larger. It's probably going to be another year or so until they completely stop updating drivers for XP. Same with other hardware...
 
When I first loaded up the beta Win7 there were some some instances where it ran slower than XP running normal applications, but they've done a bunch of updates since this was released and I have not seen that for a while now. Of course, I have not measured this but it seems to be just as if not faster than XP when loading my applications, games, etc. and I have not had one single crash even though this is just a beta copy. In that same time frame, XP has crashed at least a half dozen times, mainly when BF2142 froze.

I didn't like the thought of changing to Win7 since it will be a forced change, but from what I've experienced so far it will be a much welcomed change/upgrage. It just runs smoother, steadier, and believe it or not, is much less buggy than XP. At least that's been my experience.

Do I care that it takes more memory or a faster proc. to run? Hell no. I don't don't know anybody who doesn't have at least a 1ghz cpu any more, and unless you're running a 32 bit version of the OS then you have at least 2gb of RAM these days any way.
 
More ram usage is really what pisses me off with vista and 7. It means more grinding of your HDD to put it in ram and also less ram available to applications. I guess I should just buy a new computer and an SSD and stfu funally... CPU or GPU performance isn't really that much of an issue for me.
 
Yeah, you hit it right on the head there about the RAM and HD. A SSD would work well there, and I have a friend who has one that he's using with Win7 and it runs much faster on Win7 and without the stutters that it gets when he uses one with XP. Of course, XP was built way before SSDs so what can you expect?
 
The stutters are mostly controller issues imo (especially write-related and small file access). When they improve their controllers a bit, SSDs should begin behave no differently than mech. hard drives hopefully. They've been putting on more cache to mitigate the issues too.
 
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