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Another in a series on Vista.

I blogged in April about the hardware baseline for Vista - I pointed out that the minimum specs were pretty steep:

• general knowledge worker - Pentium 4 class machine, 1GB RAM, 80GB HDD, 1Gbit ethernet, accelerated graphics capability
• ‘power worker’ - Pentium 4 class machine; dual core and 64 bit ideal, 2GB RAM, 100GB HDD, 1Gbit ethernet, accelerated graphics capability

This garnered a comment from Wolfie2k6:

I have it running very nicely, thank you - with all bells and whistles - on a box that cost me less than $500. That’s including a set of high end Altec Lansing speakers.

Wake up folks - hardware is CHEAP.

I still contend that the minimum hardware is way more than $500 - and that was validated this week with the release of the hardware specs for Windows Vista Premium - one of the SKUs likely to be deployed by corporate customers:

The following are requirements for Windows Vista Premium logo-compliant PC and will be mandated by June 1st, 2007:

• Must have H.264 hardware decoding
• Must have HDCP
• Must support multi-monitor support
• Must have HD audio
• Must have HD audio jack presence detection
• Must have Serial ATA 2.5
• Must have minimum of 50MB NV cache on hybrid HD’s with at least 8MB/sec write 16MB/sec read (for mobile only)
• Must support booting from USB flash drives
• Must have Windows Vista Green Button on all remotes
• Must have Green Driver Quality Rating (DQR)

DailyTech has the full skinny.

Written at: Ottawa, Canada