Vista arrives January 30 - it's official

Stan Beer
Thursday, 09 November 2006 05:05

Your IT - Home IT

Alright Windows XP users, January 30 2007 is the day you can start ordering your upgrade to Vista. As for new PC buyers, Microsoft reckons the stores will be bursting with Vista machines with scarcely an XP box in sight.

In a press conference earlier today, Jim Allchin, co-president of the platforms and services division at Microsoft, said that Redmond had signed off on the the RTM build of Vista and that the product is ready to ship.

Volume licenses to corporations of course will ship earlier, November 30 is the latest date being given.

The official news of Vista's arrival early next year will set the cat among the pigeons in the hardware space. Vista is a particularly resource hungry operating system. It requires CPU power, loads of memory and a good graphics processor among other things. Many existing boxes that run Windows XP quite well will not run Vista.

A reseller told iTWire today that users who wish to run Vista with the Aero interface should not consider buying a PC with anything less than a dual-core processor, 2GB RAM and a fast graphics card with 256MB of cache if they want good performance. Most users today have machines that fall well short of those specs.