What tool can you use to determine whether or not your computer hardware and software is compatible with windows 7?

Answer 1

If it's running Vista, it will almost certainly run 7. There's really very little reason for anyone to stick with Vista. If it's running XP, it's not as clear-cut, since a machine that runs XP just fine may or may not have the horsepower to handle 7. If you're running anything under XP... then probably not; any machine that pre-dates XP is almost certainly too old, unless you've upgraded it piecewise (new motherboard here, new graphics card there, more memory, and so on).

In the Related Links section there's a link to Microsoft's Windows 7 Upgrade Advisor that will give you some idea of how 7 will work on your machine.

Answer 2

You can use Microsoft's Windows 7 compatibility tester if you can find it. The official Microsoft site tells the specifications.

If you want to run Windows 7 on your PC, here's what it takes:

• 1 gigahertz (GHz) or faster 32-bit (x86) or 64-bit (x64) processor
• 1 gigabyte (GB) RAM (32-bit) or 2 GB RAM (64-bit)
• 16 GB available hard disk space (32-bit) or 20 GB (64-bit)
• DirectX 9 graphics device with WDDM 1.0 or higher driver