You will be hearing more from me around Windows Vista and Office 2007 over the coming months. Until the beta ships, one of the first things you might want to do is to find out if yours and your customers systems are likely to have any problems running Vista.

People often ask what the minimum specs are for running Vista and there are really three ways to think on this:

• What can run Vista, provide access to search and new UI features
• All of the above, plus the 3D and transparency graphics
• Take advantage of all of the features possible

To take advantage of the nice graphics, you will need at least 64MB of speedy graphics memory (but my 2yr old laptop with a Radeon 7600 does this fine) and a graphics card that the manufacturer states will be available with both a WDDM graphics driver and will support “Glass”

For the other features, you will need to have technology such as TPM 1.2 or above for the BitLocker technology or SideShow technology to enable applications that run on other hardware alongside your PC.

This defines the difference between Vista Ready and Vista Capable,

So, finally, to the minimum spec. There have just been published at http://www.microsoft.com/windowsvista/getready/capable.mspx, but to be more sure, you can also run the check tool found at http://www.microsoft.com/windowsvista/getready/default.mspx

The Vista Ready and Capable information from the web site: