- Windows XP, an older but popular Windows operating system, has a variety of specifications recommended for reliable performance, including a processor of 300 MHz, as well as a minimum of 128MB of RAM and at least 1.5GB of hard drive space. The operating system can run on less, but Microsoft recommends these settings at a minimum. For Vista, Microsoft recommends a 1 GHz processor, 1GB of RAM and a 40GB hard drive with at least 15GB of free space.
- For Microsoft's most recent (as of the date of publication) operating system, Windows 7, the company recommends having at least 1GB of RAM, 1 GHz of processing power (with either an x86 or x64 processor) and 16GB of hard drive space if you are using the 32-bit version of Windows 7; 20GB of hard drive space is recommended if you are installing the 64-bit version.
- As of the date of publication, the latest Mac operating system release is Lion, or Mac OS X 10.7. To run this operating system, you will need a Mac computer with at least 2GB of memory, as well as an Intel Core Duo 2, Xeon, Core i3, Core i5 or Core i7 processor chip. The operating system also requires at least 7GB of free memory space on your machine, as well as a previous installation of Mac OS X 10.6.6 (an iteration of the OS X Snow Leopard system), though Apple recommends having version 10.6.8.
- For users who want a Linux-based operating system, the latest operating system of Ubuntu as of the date of publication is 10.11, as of 2011. The desktop (or full) version of this operating system recommends at least 15GB of hard drive space, 1GB of RAM, a processor speed of at least 1 GHz with an x86 chip that is a Pentium 4 chip or better. The netbook version of this system recommends an Intel Atom processor with a speed of 1.6 GHz but only 316MB of RAM and 4GB of hard drive space.
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