I might just have said goodbye to Vista before even having said hello to it.

Like most new technologies, people ask themselves if they really need the latest cutting edge graphics card, motherboard, cpu, or in this case OS. Windows XP in all it's 32 bits is considered by many to be Microsoft's greatest OS ever, especially in terms of stability. I'm not saying it's perfect (there is always room for improvement), or that there aren't better or more stable OSes (Linux?) out there offered by other companies, but that XP compared to it's predecessors is incomparable.

So since it's late October 2001 release, most of us have been running our hardware wrapped in XP. If you had the latest in hardware at that time, then you probably had an ATI 8500 PRO or a GeForce3 TI 500. Your cpu was either an AMD Athlon XP processor 1900+, or a 2.0 GHz Pentium 4 Northwood sitting on a top notch slot A or 423 socket motherboard respectively. Things have sure come a long way since then - from 64 bit cpus to SLI and everything in between.

With Vista just around the corner, and things still moving extremely fast, what will you have for a desktop in 2006? What will you really need if Vista is to boot up the way you want it to? Dan Warne, from APC got some answers from a Microsoft strategist that are sure to interest us all.

I am going to sum up very briefly what the system requirements will be (for now):

- PCI x16 with lots of ram
- S-ATA 2 with NCQ
- 2 GB of DDR3
- Dual core cpu
- HDCP capable monitors

For me personally, I would have to shell out some "serious" cash to be Vista ready. I'm sure my actual setup will run Vista, just like an AMD k6-2 500MHz on an ASUS P5A with 500 MB of ram can run XP (my aunt's machine), but just not at "optimal". We will just have to wait to see if an "unoptimal" Vista is better than a fully optimal XP.

I encourage you to read the full article linked above and comments are more than welcome.