So you’ve seen Vista on the computers at your local retailer. You also decide that you like the way it looks and feels. But you don’t want to spend the money to buy a whole new computer, plus you’d have to move all of your files over and that can be a pain.

The question becomes, can your computer run the new Windows Vista? Lets take a look at the requirements, straight from Microsoft:

For Home Basic:

1. 1 GHz 32-bit (x86) or 64-bit (x64) processor
2. 512 MB of system memory
3. 20 GB hard drive with at least 15 GB of available space
4. Support for DirectX 9 graphics and 32 MB of graphics memory
5. DVD-ROM drive Audio Output Internet access (fees may apply)

Windows Home Premium:

1. 1 GHz 32-bit (x86) or 64-bit (x64) processor
2. 1 GB of system memory
3. 40 GB hard drive with at least 15 GB of available space
4. DVD-ROM drive Audio Output Internet access (fees may apply)
5. Support for DirectX 9 graphics with:

• WDDM Driver
• 128 MB of graphics memory (minimum)
• Pixel Shader 2.0 in hardware
• 32 bits per pixel

So now you’re thinking, did I see Vista home basic or Vista home premium?  This is an easy quesiton to answer.  Home basic is almost never sold.  The differences between Vista home basic and Windows XP are security settings and a few other things.  It looks and feels just like XP when you use it, and no one buys Vista for anything but the look and feel.  So the version you saw at the store that looked really fancy and had cool graphics when tabbing through programs was Vista home premium.

Now that you know what you need minimally you need to decide how much above the minimum specs you need to go (don’t run Vista with a 40 Gb hard drive and a 1 Ghz processor, it’ll be way too slow).

I have two laptops, one runs windows XP, the other runs Vista.  Both have a 2 Ghz AMD processor, and both have 1 Gb of memory.  The XP machine has a graphics card that shares 64 Mb of memory, and the Vista machine has 128 Mb of shared memory for graphics.

Both are similar in specs, and both run the OS they have pretty well.  Where Vista will hurt you is on graphics.  It needs a lot of graphical performance if to show you all that cool stuff it does.  If you don’t plan on doing too much photo or video editing, and don’t play games, then a 128 card with shared memory should work fine for you.

I don’t have much issue with 1 Gb of total memory, but my computer really slows down if I’m doing too many things at once.  Each program you have open uses up a chunk of your memory, so the more windows you have open the more is used up.  When too much memory gets used up your computer will slow down quite a bit.  So if you really like to have a lot of different windows open you’ll want to get 2Gb or more.

If you do plan on doing a lot of graphically intense stuff you should get a dedicated graphics card with either 128 or 256 Mb of memory.

Vista eats up hard drive space pretty quick with indexes and other things.  I would recommend an 80 Gb hard drive minimum with most of it unused.

To recap, don’t upgrade if you’re right at the minimum specs for Vista home premium.  If you don’t want to do lots of graphically intense stuff you should be fine with a 128 Mb shared memory, and if you’re willing to keep the number of windows open to a few 1 Gb should be ok for total memory, otherwise you’ll need to upgrade.

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Windows Vista has been mired in a lot of controversy since it was released.  The short answer to the question posited in the title of this post is no.  But in an effort to help you understand why I’ll spend a little longer and explain why.

1.  Vista doesn’t offer anything compelling (other than shiny graphics) to you when compared to XP.

2.  The shiny new graphics from Vista, the only thing that most users will consider upgraded, eat up a lot of your CPU.  Forget about playing games or anything else that’s graphic intensive unless you have a top of the line (expensive) machine to run Vista.

3.  Most IT departments aren’t switching to Vista, if a company with an IT department refuses to make the switch, you shouldn’t either.

4.  Vista isn’t compatible with a lot of the drivers currently written for your peripherals.  Forget about your 3 year old printer working with it even though all you had to do was plug it into your XP machine and click print.

5.  Vista has an annoying user access control popup every time you install something.  I recognize that this is Microsofts attempt at making Vista more secure than previous versions of Windows.  But it all it does is annoy most users since they don’t have the computer savvy to know that they shouldn’t allow program asdfrsrefdsf.exe to run when they’re trying to install a program.

6.  Vista is expensive.  Really all upgrades on Windows are expensive so save yourself the time and money.

7.  Most computer manufacturers still let you buy a machine from them with XP on it, if you can get it that way you should.

8.  Microsoft is going to continue support for XP well into the release of Windows 7.  You can continue to get updates and patches for XP for a long time, there’s no compelling reason to make the switch.

There’s 8 pretty good reasons to stay with XP, if you can think of anymore let me know.

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