Hi all,

Im starting to read my win 7 books now so will be putting up a few posts around my studying. The first blog post is about the minimum hardware requirements of windows 7 and also its features.

Firstly Windows 7 has 6 different editions which are: STARTER, HOME BASIC, HOME PREMIUM, PROFESSIONAL, ENTERPRISE, ULTIMATE.

The hardware requirements for 7 Starter and basic are as follows:

1Ghz x86 or x64 CPU

512MB’s of RAM

20GB hard disk (for x64 version) or 16GB hard disk for x86 version both must have 15GB free.

A graphics card that supports DX9 and has at least 32MB of Ram.

Windows 7 Home Premium and upwards requires:

1Ghz x64 or x86 CPU

1GB’s of RAM

40GB hard disk (15GB free)

A graphics card that supports DX9 and has a WDDM driver with pixel shader 2, 32bits per pixel and 128MB or RAM.

As always these minimum requires are of the OS only and you will find that Windows 7 will probably be usable but slow, adding applications will often make these systems too slow to use sensibly so you will need to install win7 in the real world on computers that are far better than the specs above.

Other hardware restrictions in windows 7 editions include support for up to 8GB or RAM in the x64 versions of Starter and Home Basic, whilst Home Premium is up to 16GB or RAM on x64 editions. All higher editions (Pro/Ent/Ult) are only limited by the x64 architecture which limits the RAM to 128GB (still if you get that in a laptop in the next few years your doing well).

The below table shows some of the major features of Windows 7 and which edition supports it.

	Starter	Home Basic	Home Premium	Professional	Enterprise/Ultimate
Features
Windows Aero	N	N	Y	Y	Y
DVD Playback	N	N	Y	Y	Y
Media Center	N	N	Y	Y	Y
IIS	N	N	Y	Y	Y
ICS	N	Y	Y	Y	Y
Join Domain	N	N	N	Y	Y
EFS	N	N	N	Y	Y
AppLocker	N	N	N	N	Y
Direct Access	N	N	N	N	Y
Bit Locker	N	N	N	N	Y
RDP	N	N	N	Y	Y
Branch Cache	N	N	N	N	Y