No complete details of Vista's hardware requirements have yet been revealed by Microsoft beyond general recommendations and guidelines.

The guidelines for Beta 1 give this basic list of requirements: [5]

• 512 megabytes or more of RAM
• a dedicated graphics card with Direct X 9.0 support
• a modern Intel Pentium- or AMD Athlon -based PC

Microsoft expanded on these basic requirements at its TechEd 2005 conference on Australia's Gold Coast in August 2005. Microsoft strategist Nigel Page said, for Aero Glass users would need a video card with 256 MB or more of RAM, for the 64-bit version of Vista they would need 2 GB of DDR3 RAM, and for increased performance all round users will need a hard drive with the native command queuing (NCQ) feature of Serial ATA 2.