With the release of Windows 10 Technical Preview by Microsoft, the system requirements were also revealed. As the company had hinted, the system requirements would not change much compared to those required for Windows Vista. Thus, both new and old computers will be able to run the new operating system.
This was confirmed through a short tweet from Windows Insider lead Gabriel Aul, in which he mentioned that Microsoft went to great lengths to keep the system requirements unchanged during the development of the new version of Windows so that they remained almost identical to Windows Vista.
Below are the system requirements for Windows 10 Technical Preview, which are very likely not to change in the final version of the operating system:
- Processor: 1 gigahertz (GHz) or faster
- RAM: 1 gigabyte (GB) (32-bit) or 2 GB (64-bit)
- Free hard disk space: 16 GB
- Graphics card: Microsoft DirectX 9 graphics device with WDDM driver
- A Microsoft account and Internet access.
And if you're wondering, below are the system requirements for Windows Vista, which are almost similar to those for Windows 10:
- Processor: 1-gigahertz (GHz) 32-bit (x86) or 64-bit (x64)
- RAM: 1 GB system memory
- 128 MB graphics memory (minimum)
- 40-GB hard drive, with 15 GB of free hard drive space (the 15 GB of free space is provided for temporary file storage during installation or upgrade).
One of the reasons Microsoft decided to keep the system requirements unchanged is its effort to move users from old versions of Windows to the new ones, thus offering a new operating system that will run on old hardware.
On the other hand, Windows XP users will have to at least upgrade their hardware in order to run Windows 10.
