Redmond (WA) - Microsoft has an answer for all those who have been wondering whether to buy a new computer or upgrade the hardware for Windows Vista. The company has posted the minimum requirements for Windows Vista, and there is a good chance that your four or five year old PC can run Vista.

According to the company, the baseline configuration should have an 800 MHz processor, 512 MB of memory, a CD-ROM drive, a 20 GB hard drive (15 GB are occupied by the basic Vista installation) and an SVGA graphics card capable of displaying a resolution of 800 x 600 pixels. From the view of the minimum requirements of Windows XP Home (300 MHz CPU, 128 MB memory, 1.5 GB hard disk space, CD-ROM SVGA graphics card), that's a substantial increase in computing horsepower, but it may not be enough to run Vista as it will be advertised by Microsoft.

In fact, the described 800 MHz system represents the "Windows Vista minimum supported system requirements" that will be able to run the "core features of the operating" system. You won't be seeing the new eye-candy and flashy animation effects and shouldn't think about exploiting the systems multimedia features.

System builders currently recommend a dual-core processor, a discrete graphics card and 2 GB of system memory for Windows Vista Premium, which is expected to become the volume version of the operating system.

Click here to see screenshots of Windows Vista ...