I have always wondered why someone would want to upgrade their Operating System to a newer Microsoft OS? Seems like to me similar to suddenly decided to upgrade your car's engine. Most people have no idea what engine is under the hood, much less think of changing it. If it runs fine why change it.

Upgrading is expensive, complicated and rarely improves the users computing experience. Millions of people still use Windows 98 (an 8 year old OS). It is stable and works fine and even though Microsoft will soon stop support it will continue to work fine for many years. It it is not broken why fix it.

All that said the following are the currently known facts related to upgrading. We won't really know until January 2007, if Microsoft actually ships Vista then. The are not known for making deadlines, especially since they will have seven different versions of Vista!

Vista will require a major increase in computing power and hardware. You need at least 512MB RAM (2GB preferred), SVGA 800×600, DirectX 9, a video card with at least 128MB video RAM, a P3-800 (Vista dumbed down) or P3-1 GHz and a big hard drive with a minimum of 60GB for Home Vista to 160GB with all the features turned on. You can find all the gory details at: Microsoft Vista Hardware Specification.