Check CD Drive Type

You should pay close attention to the type of CD drive your PC has because the retail version of Windows Vista only comes packaged with a DVD rather than a plain CD. Fitting everything for Vista on one DVD rather than having to use multiple CDs is beneficial; however, it’s not that (Далее…)

Verify Hard Drive Space

As you probably know, all the files and software on your PC take up space on the hard drive (see Figure 1.14), which is the main data storage component in a PC. Hard drives store your email, pictures, movies, music files, letters, work files, and everything else you create, along with thousands of files that comprise the operating system. With each version of the OS, Windows has gotten larger and larger. Vista needs about 10 times more space than Windows XP. (Далее…)

Check Memory (RAM)

Along with the processor, the amount of random access memory (RAM), or simply memory for short, greatly influences your PC’s performance. Rather than a shortage component like a hard drive, RAM (Figure 1.13 shows an example) is used when the information needs to be quickly (Далее…)

Check the Processor (CPU)

The central processor unit (CPU) is the component that’s responsible for processing the information and commands between the different components that make up your PC, which basically makes it the brain of your PC. Therefore, the speed of the processor greatly influences your PC’s performance. When considering the upgrade to Windows Vista, you need to ensure your CPU can process quickly enough to support the new features of Vista. A sample CPU is shown in Figure 1.11. (Далее…)

System Requirements and Recommendations

In case you can’t get the Windows Vista Upgrade Advisor to work properly on your PC or you want to take a quick look at what it takes to run Windows Vista, this section covers the system requirements and recommendations. In addition, you can refer to the next several sections on how to manually check the specs of the different system components on your PC.
First, you can take a look at the bare-minimum system requirements to install and run Windows Vista: (Далее…)