In my last post, I talked about the Windows 7 Upgrade Advisor. This program can tell you whether your computer is ready for Windows 7. Many users, however, haven’t upgraded from earlier versions of Windows. If you’re not ready to upgrade to Windows 7, you can still consider an upgrade to Windows Vista.

Windows Vista Works Well For Home Users

Although Windows Vista has gotten a lot of bad press, the truth is that most home users don’t find it to be terribly troublesome. In fact, it has a lot of nice features, many of which have been carried forward into Windows 7.

Drivers can be a source of problems with Windows Vista, and Vista doesn’t work well with Active Directory. The interoperability problems with AD will cause problems in the workplace, and IT professionals have largely overlooked Vista for this reason. For most home users, however, the Active Directory issues with Vista are unlikely to cause major problems.

Home users are notoriously slow to update their operating systems, even when they have a reasonably good reason to. If your computer is still running an older version of the Windows OS, now is a good time to consider upgrading to Vista. Upgrading isn’t usually without at least a few hitches, so if you plan to upgrade to Vista, you’ll want to consult the Vista Upgrade Advisor to help you spot potential problems with hardware or with your software.

As a general rule of thumb, your computer must have the following in order to run Windows Vista (Home Premium/Business/Ultimate) successfully:

1 GHz 32-bit (x86) or 64-bit (x64) processor
1 GB of system memory
40 GB hard drive with at least 15 GB of available space
Support for DirectX 9 graphics with:
WDDM Driver
128 MB of graphics memory
Pixel Shader 2.0 in hardware
32 bits per pixel
DVD-ROM drive
Audio Output
Internet access

The requirements are slightly different for Windows Home Basic. You’ll need less installed memory and less hard disk space. The graphics demands for Windows Home Basic are also reduced.

If your system doesn’t meet the basic requirements, or barely meets the basic requirements, you can expect degraded performance when you try to run applications on top of your OS. If you find that you need to do major upgrades to your computer hardware in order to run Windows Vista, you may want to consider a newer computer. You can get some really nice deals on capable, low-cost computers right now, and these computers come with Vista pre-loaded.

Photo Credit: Brett Pierce