With tomorrow’s release of Windows 7 perhaps you are asking yourself if you should upgrade or more pertinently if your PC can run Windows 7. If you aren’t planning on buying a new PC and are considering upgrading Windows on your current PC, then there are two ways to check if your PC will work with Windows 7. The first is to manually check the system requirements and compare them to your PC, the other is to run the Microsoft Windows 7 upgrade advisor.
The published minimum system requirements for Windows 7 are:
- 1 gigahertz (GHz) or faster 32-bit (x86) or 64-bit (x86) processor
- 1 gigabyte (GB) RAM (32-bit) or 2 GB RAM (64-bit)
- 16 GB available hard disk space (32-bit) or 20 GB (64-bit)
- DirectX 9 graphics device with WDDM 1.0 or higher driver
What that means is you need a Pentium 4 or greater (some later model Pentium 3 processor reach 1Ghz and beyond), 1 gigabytes of memory (but 2 would be preferable) a 40GB hard drive (which about half will be used for Windows) and an nVidia GeForce 6 series or better graphics card, or an ATI Radeon 9500 or better.
If your PC is already running Windows Vista then you are pretty much guaranteed that it will work with Windows 7.
The recommended way to check for Windows 7 compatibility is to run the Windows 7 upgrade advisor. The upgrade advisor scans your hardware, devices, and installed programs for known compatibility issues, gives you guidance on how to resolve potential issues found, and recommends what to do before you upgrade.
The upgrade advisor only works on Windows Vista and Windows XP Service Pack 2, so if you are running Windows 2000 you can’t run it but also it is likely that your PC is too old to run Windows 7.
Popularity: 10% [?]
[...] Related links: Will My PC Run Windows 7? New Upgrade Advisor Available [...]