Windows 7 Minimum System Requirements

With the release of Windows 7 RC which takes Microsoft a step further to release Windows 7 as a final product (RTM), the official minimum system hardware requirements for Windows 7 operating system has been released too. The final Windows 7 minimum system requirements are slightly modified to increase the hardware specs required to run 64-bit (x64) edition of Windows 7.

According to ZDNet, the minimum hardware recommendations for Windows 7 are:

• 1 GHz 32-bit or 64-bit processor
• 1 GB of RAM (32-bit) or 2 GB of system memory (64-bit)
• 16 GB of available disk space (32-bit) or 20 GB of avaiable disk space (64-bit)
• DirectX 9 graphics device with WDDM 1.0 or higher driver.

In addition, in order to install and use Windows Virtual PC and Windows XP Mode, the following hardware requirements are recommended by Microsoft:

• 2 GB of system memory.
• Extra additional 15 GB of free disk space.
• Intel-VT or AMD-V supported and enabled CPU (to support hardware virtualization). This requirement is now optional with the installation of KB977206 to remove hardware virtualization prerequisite.

The minimum system requirements for Windows 7 are generally applied to all editions of Windows 7, and not SKU-specific. The requirements remain largely unchanged from minimum system requirements of Windows Vista, which should allow Windows Vista user to make easier upgrade decision.