Windows 7 To Run on Vista's Recommended Hardware

Microsoft Window Vista’s product life is far from being over, but Microsoft is slowly revealing some detailson its upcoming Windows 7.

Chris Flores of the Windows Client Communications team shared publicly some new tidbits about Windows 7 on a blog. Flores explains Windows 7 will take a new approach, vastly different from how Vista was developed and marketed. “We know that when we talk about our plans for the next release of Windows, people take action. As a result, we can significantly impact our partners and our customers if we broadly share information that later changes. With Windows 7, we’re trying to more carefully plan how we share information with our customers and partners. This means sharing the right level of information at the right time depending on the needs of the audience,” explained Flores.

Despite being tight slipped, Flores was able to share that Windows 7 will not be built on a new kernel. Instead Microsoft will be “refining the kernel architecture and componentization model introduced in Windows Vista.” Flore reassures the change in strategy will no impact user experience but allow Microsoft engineers agility in delivering the six dimensions of quality – device compatibility, application compatibility, reliability, performance, battery life, and security.

However, what may be the most interesting to hardware vendors and OEMs, is that fact that Microsoft is talking about Windows 7 running on Vista “recommended” hardware specifications. No details as to what type of experience one would encounter using “recommended” hardware with Windows 7. Currently Vista Home Premium recommends: 1 GHz processor, 1 GB of memory, 40 GB of hard drive space, DirectX 9 support with WDDM drivers, DVD-ROM, audio output, and internet access. Vista Home Basic requirements, as you can imagine, is slightly less demanding recommends a 1GHz processor, 512 MB of memory, 20GB of hard drive space, DX 9 support, DVD-ROM, audio output, and internet access.

Windows 7 is slated to be ready in 2010, but the timeline for betas have yet to be finalized.