There have been several releases of the Windows 10 technical preview. Is your computer ready? The easy answer is if your computer can run Windows 8.1, most likely you won’t have an issue with Windows 10. Most users haven’t upgraded to 8.1 yet so the gotcha is, can your system run Windows 8.1? Windows 8 requires PAE/NS/SSE. These requirements take advantage of extra storage, streaming enhancements and application protection. To determine if your computer can run Windows 8, try installing it. The first thing Windows 8.x does is run a PC compatibility check. Another method of testing your PC is to download and run Coreinfo v3.31 from Microsoft. Coreinfo v3.31 can be downloaded at https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/cc835722.
There are some technical issues with the preview and it might not run on every system, even though the system meets all the requirements. This issue will be fixed before the final release. A word of caution- installing the technical preview might disable some functions in Windows 8, especially the media player. If you are going to install Windows 10 technical preview, it is recommended you do this on a virtual machine such as Hyper-V, Virtual Box, Parallels, or VMWare etc.
For more information on Microsoft’s minimum requirements, it is recommended you review the FAQ at http://windows.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/preview-faq-system-requirements-pc. The minimum specs are:
- Processor: 1 gigahertz (GHz) or faster
- RAM: 1 gigabyte (GB) (32-bit) or 2 GB (64-bit)
- Free hard disk space: 16 GB
- Graphics card: Microsoft DirectX 9 graphics device with WDDM driver
- A Microsoft account and Internet access
