How Much Will A Vista PC Cost You?
Mary Jo Foley has an article about how businesses are worried how much Windows Vista is going to call them. Frankly, the enterprise user she talks to sounds like a moron, assuming that Vista requires unbelievably powerful hardware that doesn’t exist:
MR. Biz: vista will NEVER run on a $1000 PC
MR. Biz: EVER
MR. Biz: maybe a $1500 PC, but that one doesn’t exist Yet
MR. Biz: there aren’t cheap dual cores yet
MR. Biz: price point is still around $2000
What a maroon. Vista Business Edition has the same hardware requirements as Vista Home Basic, since you don’t need fancy Aero graphics in a business environment (something he assumes is a requirement). That means Vista Business can run on:
- 800 MHz processors
- 512 Megabytes of RAM
- A GPU capable of DirectX 9
That’s it, bub. Dell’s cheapest computer, the Dimension B110, can meet all those requirements for about $450, and gets the Vista Capable sticker under $400 (for some reason). So don’t tell me that your company needs to spend upwards of $2000 for Vista; there isn’t a system you can buy that can’t handle a business upgrade for Vista.
PCs that are Vista-ready are available for $400 as you mention, and laptops for as little as under $800. And many existing PCs, ones that people have purchased in the last couple of years, may also meet the minimum bar for Vista, as noted in http://blogs.msdn.com/mthree/archive/2006/09/01/735675.aspx.
Comment by M3 Sweatt | September 2, 2006