Microsoft has provided more details about the system requirements for its very much awaited Office 2010 suite through the January 22nd blog post. Microsoft Office 2010 will be released by June 2010.
The most important question here is: Does your computer require any additional hardware support when switching from Office 2007 to Office 2010?
If you have recently acquired a new system or your system supports Office 2007 then you should not face any difficulties. Though you should consider the requirements mentioned below if you are presently using Office 2003.
The 32-bit version of Office 2010 will run on the following 32-bit operating systems:
•Windows XP with Service Pack (SP)3
•Windows Vista SP1
•Windows 7
•Windows Server 2008
•Windows Server 2003 R2 (with MS XML).
The 64-bit version will run on the 64-bit versions of all of these same operating systems, with the exception of Windows Server 2003 R2.
Alex Dubec, a Program Manager on the Office Trustworthy Computing Performance team, blogged that the CPU and RAM requirements have almost doubled between Office 2003 and Office 2007. The minimum system recommendations for Office 2003 specified a 233 MHz processor and 128 MB of RAM. However for Office 2010, the suggested minimum requirements are a 500 MHz processor and 256 MB of RAM.
The disk-space requirements for Office 2010 are somewhat greater than for Office 2007 or Office 2003. Dubec noted that the footprint of most Office apps has gotten larger. As a result, “most standalone application disk-space requirements have gone up by 0.5 GB and the suites have increased by 1.0 or 1.5 GB,” he said.
“New features mean more code,” Dubec explained. The introduction of 64-bit Office, an Office-wide Ribbon implementation, inclusion of OneNote in more versions of Office 2010 offerings, and the optional free trial versions of Pro 2010 apps in the retail boxed versions of Office 2010, all add up to the total disk space requirements.
Another addition in Office 2010 is that it has a GPU requirement in order to speed up graphics rendering of charts in Excel or transitions in PowerPoint. Microsoft designed Office 2010 to assume a minimum Microsoft DirectX 9.0c compliant graphics processors with 64 MB video memory, which Dubec characterized as fairly minimal. He noted that Office 2010 will still work on PCs without a standalone GPU.
Dubec has provided more details in his post on the Office Engineering blog:
“One of the pieces of feedback we’ve received from customers is that they really, really hate having to buy new hardware every time a new version of Office is released. With that in mind, one of our goals for the Office 2010 was to make sure that the minimum hardware requirement would not increase from Office 2007. We invested in improving the customer experience on minimum-requirement hardware, and we regularly tested performance throughout the development cycle. Our footprint has gotten larger since Office 2007, but we’re proud to say that we’ve succeeded in keeping the CPU and RAM requirements the same as for Office 2007.”
The expectations with Microsoft Office 2010 will surely be high because of the higher system requirements that it asks for. Lets hope it stands up to the expectations.
