You May Not Run Vista, But Your PC Actually MightYou May Not Run Vista, But Your PC Actually Might

The headline is back: More Than Half Of All Business PCs Can't Run Vista, Survey Says. The last time we saw it was in April. The version then read, Many PCs Won't Be Able To Run Vista When It Comes Out, Gartner Advises . It's a story that's taken on a life of its own. Trouble is, I think it's more scare-mongering than truth-telling.The truth, as I understand it, is that many PCs will run Vista. They just won't run all of Vista, or run it very well.

The Gartner story in April was long on pronouncements and short on hard facts, but at least it got it right in the text, if not in the headline: "About half of corporate PCs aren't equipped to run all the features of Windows Vista . . . ."

The more recent version comes from Softchoice, a service provider, and at least it adds some solid numbers -- the company surveyed 112,113 desktops at 472 companies and found that 51 percent of business PCs are more than three years old, for example. But it never quite gets around to making the key distinction between running Vista at all and running it all well.

After considerable research, here's what I think I know: Vista is built to configure itself to the PC it's being installed on. It inventories the hardware and then turns on those pieces of itself that will provide an appropriate "user experience." That means, for instance, that if the graphics card won't support the Aero interface, Aero isn't enabled when you boot up the machine for the first time.

There are, of course, some minimum requirements for running Vista at all: To wear the "Vista-capable" logo, a PC needs an 800 MHz processor, 512 Mbytes of RAM, and a graphics card with 32MB of video RAM and DirectX 9 support (although that DirectX 9 thing seems to be soft).

To run all of Vista is to be "Premium Ready," and that means a 1 GHz processor, 1 gigabyte of RAM, and a DirectX 9-capable GPU with Hardware Pixel Shader v2.0 and WDDM Driver support.

Microsoft has talked a lot about the Vista "user experience." There are actually several, and they depend on your hardware:

So there's a big difference between not being able to run all the features of Vista and not being able to run Vista at all. And that difference usually comes down to a memory upgrade and a new graphics card. Softchoice consultant Dean Williams says, for example, that 41 percent of the computers that didn't meet Vista's requirements didn't meet them because they need a RAM upgrade. That's a fairly straightforward fix.

And while you've got the box open, you should probably put in a new graphics card, too. The only problem here is that many PCs that are a few years old won't have PCI Express graphics support. You can buy an AGP graphics card that will support Vista just fine, but new PCs come with PCI Express slots, so PCI Express cards are easier to find.

A CPU upgrade, though, is a different question -- particularly if you've got a laptop, as Williams notes. If you need a faster CPU, it's probably easier to buy a new PC.

These are very different decisions if you're a small-office-home-office kind of person that if you're a corporate-IT kind of person who has to worry about standardizing the OS on hundreds or thousands of PCs. But in either case, before you go for the urban myth that your PC (or your thousands of PCs) won't run Vista, you should decide how much of Vista you need to run.