System Requirements guide - Stage One Wiki

A guide to System Requirements

System requirements are often confusing things. So I figured someone should make a guide to them. Thus by tomorrow there should be a significant massive block of text below this.

The first pitfall most users seem to fall into is the difference between Minimum and Recommended System Requirements. Minimum system requirements seem to be a throwback from the 1990s where applications didn't actually need that much processing power to run and programmers could be confident that even older systems could run. The unfortunate thing is that this has changed so now minimum system requirements mean that if your computer meets them the application will either barely run with a minimal feature set or not at all. This is why the first rule of thumb is to make sure your PC meets the Recommended System Requirements.

To illustrate the point I will use my retail box of Windows Vista Home Premium.

Note I am currently freezing in Lab 02 of CompSci111G so I will write it from the comfort of my own PC tonight not some awful Apple Mac

                          Rapid Evolution

1. 1989 Tim Berners-Lee begins work on the WWW project
2. 1991 WWW operational at CERN
3. 1992 WWW goes public
4. 1993 Mosaic created by Marc Andreessen (First GUI browser)
5. 1994 US Senate allow commerce on Internet
6. Netscape Communications formed, Yahoo! formed
7. 1995 Microsoft Internet Explorer
8. 1998 Netscape became open-source, developed into Mozilla

Contents 1 Future of System requirements 2 Advantages are 3 Disadvantages are 3.1 Useful Links

Future of System requirements

In recent years computer hardware companies have started making components with 64-bit architecture. Almost all computers in the last few years are made like this but in order to take advantage of this you need to have a 64-bit operating system and program which are quite rare for computers that run Microsoft Windows which are commonly 32-bit. With the release of windows 7 this year 64-bit operating systems will become much more common.

Advantages are

1. the limit of ram is now 16 exabytes instead of 3.8gb
2. calculations are executed 3-5 times faster
3. files larger than 4gb are much faster and easier to work with
4. current 64-bit operating systems can also run 32-bit applications

Disadvantages are

1. currently there aren't many 64-bit programs on the market currently but that will soon change
2. ram is limited to 196gb but computers with this much ram are very rare

and i like this course!!!!

Useful Links

• To Wikipedia [1]
• Example of System Requirements[2]
• Assess your computers ability to run games [3]
• 64-Bit wikipedia [4]

This page was last modified 04:55, 11 August 2009.

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