How To Make Sure Your Laptop Is Vista Ready

{mosgoogle}You know something is wrong when you have to buy a new laptop just to run an operating system. The hardware specs for Windows Vista is so high that many older laptops won't be powerful enough to run the new Microsoft OS when it becomes available this summer. Those of us in the market for a new laptop right now will want one that will allow us to upgrade to Vista later on. The question, how powerful a laptop do you need? Well, we're going to tell you.

One of the coolest feature of the Vista is the new user interface call Aero. Windows Vista is the first Windows operating system that has a user experience that can scale to the hardware capabilities of the computer it is installed on. All computers that meet minimal hardware requirements will see the Windows Vista Basic user experience. However, in order to get the Aero experience, your new laptop is going to need a graphic card that supports WDDM (Windows Display Driver Mode) and have a minimum of 64MB of video memory.

In general, many laptops with integrated graphics chipsets don't have the 3D muscles to keep up with Aero's demanding requirements. However, discrete graphics chipsets offered by both ATI and NVIDIA support, or plan to support WDDM, so make sure the video card that comes with your laptop is on the WDDM list. Both ATI and NVIDIA maintain a list of "Windows Vista Ready" GPUs. Looking at the list, we can see that the GeForce 6800 Ultra Go on our Dell XPS M170 gaming laptop is Vista ready, so we're good to go.

Any mid to high-end CPU should work with Windows Vista, such as the new Core Duo processors from Intel, or the AMD Turion 64. The latter might be a very good choice since Microsoft will be releasing a 64-bit version of Vista. In any case you should avoid low end processors like the Celeron and AMD counterpart.

Microsoft recommends 512MB of memory for Windows Vista. However, we recommend you get 1GB to be on the safe side. We also recommend that your laptop comes with a DVD-ROM. Actually, we don't recommend this - you must have a DVD-ROM because Windows Vista will ship on DVD only. This shouldn't be an issue for new laptops as nearly all of them ship with DVD capability. Your laptop hard drive should be at least 5,400 PRM unit. 7,200 RPM drives with an 8 MB buffer would be better and one with SATA interface would be best.

Of all the specs we listed, the most important one to keep in mind is the WDDM graphics card. Without it, you won't be able to experience Windows Vista in all its glory. Happy shopping.