We were having a debate on this at work, so I decided to look it up. I also projected Vista’s hardware requirements based on past trends, but they haven’t been released yet… we’ll see how close they are. Between Windows 2000 and Windows XP, everything pretty much doubled. All numbers are minimums. If Vista hits the marks below as minimum requirements, I would be very surprised.
Windows 3.1 | Windows 95 | Windows 98 | Windows 2000 | Windows XP | Windows Vista (assuming linear trend) | |
CPU | Intel 80286 | 386DX | 486DX 66MHz | Pentium 133 MHz | 233 MHz | 600MHz? |
Memory | 1MB | 4MB | 16MB | 64MB | 128MB | 256MB? |
Free Disk Space | 6.5MB | 24MB | 195MB | 650MB | 1.5GB | 3GB? |