Half of current PCs are "Vista ready"

The eWeek magazine quotes a recent Gartner research about Windows Vista "ready" PCs, and concludes that about half of current PCs meet Vista's hardware requirements. Personally, I think two technical details matter most here: the amount of RAM in the PC and the video/graphics card the PC happens to have. Of course, the final system requirements are yet to be shaped, but I would bet these are the two main things.

However it should be noted that Vista will also run without the glass-like Aero graphics engine. For us software developers, it is important to learn that when your application run on Vista, you actually know that the PC the user has is powerful in today's standards. But that doesn’t mean you can get sloppy with performance and tuning of your code.