Microsoft Office 2010 Engineering The official blog of the Microsoft Office product development group

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1 Page 1 of 7 Microsoft Office 2010 Engineering The official blog of the Microsoft Office product development group Office 2010 System Requirements Office Team 22 Jan :31 AM 46 Hi everyone! My name is Alex Dubec and I m a Program Manager on the Office Trustworthy Computing Performance team. My team is responsible for compiling system requirements across Office, and I d like to give you a behind the scenes look at how we determine system requirements and the hardware your computer requires to run Office Before diving into all the details, I want to answer a question that I m sure is on all of your minds: Can I use Office 2010 on the same hardware I m using to run Office 2007? In most cases, yes! CPU and RAM requirements for Office 2010 are the same as for Office 2007, so if your computer meets the Office 2007 system requirements, you can run Office A graphics chipset will help boost the performance of certain features and disk footprint has increased (more on these points later), but as general rules: If your current computer can run Office 2007, it can run Office If you re purchasing a new laptop or netbook, it can run Office If you have a computer with a multi core processor, it can run Office 2010 even faster. If your computer is currently running Office 2003, it s possible that it can run Office 2010 (check the requirements to be sure). What do the hardware requirements mean? First off, I d like to explain what level of performance you can expect from minimum requirement hardware. The minimum hardware spec is about defining the kind of computer that an average Office customer needs to have in order to have an acceptable experience performing typical tasks. This means tasks like opening up and editing a 20 page report. Tasks like creating some simple pie charts or scatterplots that highlight your findings, and putting together a few slides summarizing your results for that meeting next Tuesday. Or even tasks like writing up your blog post about system requirements. You should also be able to comfortably run two applications simultaneously. As you might expect, more intensive tasks benefit from fast chips, more RAM, or speedy hard drives, and newer hardware makes everyday tasks faster but the hardware requirements aren t about making Office 2010 blazing fast, or about running several applications at once, or about crunching financial models in a giant spreadsheet. They re simply about getting typical tasks done. A lot of other pieces of software carry both minimum and recommended hardware requirements, and you might be wondering why Office 2010 doesn t have recommended requirements. The reason for this is that customers have told us that understanding hardware requirements can be confusing, and the difference in meaning between minimum and

2 Page 2 of 7 One of the pieces of feedback we ve received from customers is that they really, reallyhate 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 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 How do you verify the CPU and RAM requirements? To be objective about our hardware requirements, we maintain a performance test lab of machines with the following specifications: Intel Pentium III processor, 500 MHz 256 MB PC100 SDRAM Windows XP Professional with Service Pack 3 I have one of these machines in my office, and when I got it I couldn t help but laugh: it was manufactured in January Maintaining that machine and our lab becomes more challenging as time goes on this hardware hasn t been in production for years, and it keeps getting harder to find replacement parts when stuff breaks! We verified our requirements using this hardware with the following tests: We measured benchmark times for 200 typical user scenarios and 1300 additional scenarios in both Office 2007 and Office The data we collected showed that Office 2010 performance on minimum requirement hardware is comparable to Office Along the same lines, we tested memory use for the typical user scenarios, and found that memory use was comparable to Office Also, we never reached 100% memory utilization during our tests. Finally, members of our team used the test computers instead of their regular desktops for a week and reported on the experience. Performance was, as you might expect, slower than on average hardware, but nobody pulled out any hair (for reference, we believe that the average computer has a 2.1 GHz dual core processor and 2 GB of RAM. We collect this sort of information through the Customer Experience Improvement Program, which Peter Koss Nobel has explained in more detail in his blog post here.) With this data in hand, we re comfortable with a 500 MHz CPU and 256 MB of RAM as appropriate minimum requirements for Office To give this a bit of context, some of the least powerful computers available today are netbooks, and our data suggests that the average current netbook has a 1.6 GHz CPU and 1 GB of RAM which is significantly more powerful than our minimum requirement. What about disk space? We haven t changed the CPU or RAM requirements from Office 2007, but the footprint of most Office applications have gotten larger. These changes force us to increase the system requirements 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. There are a few reasons for these changes: New features. New features mean more code. Also, even if you re installing 32 bit Office, code changes to support the introduction of 64 bit Office increase our footprint.

3 Page 3 of 7 What operating systems are supported? To determine which operating systems would be supported for Office 2010, we prioritized based on usage statistics for a given OS, as well as the engineering costs associated with ensuring compatibility and providing customer support for that OS. The following charts summarize OS compatibility for Office Why is there a new graphics processor requirement? If you ve checked out Office 2010 s full system requirements, you ve probably noticed the new graphics processor (GPU) requirement, and might be wondering what that s all about. Another piece of feedback we received after releasing Office 2007 is that customers were interested in harnessing more of the potential of their PCs. Many computers in 2007 and most computers today have graphics processors separate from the CPU (this doesn t necessarily mean a dedicated graphics card; for example, most laptops don t have a physical graphics card, but do come with a graphics processor). If your computer has a GPU, it lets us perform graphics rendering tasks (like drawing charts in Excel, or transitions in PowerPoint) in the GPU instead of in the CPU, which parallelizes work and speeds up performance. This is particularly relevant for users of PowerPoint 2010, which will introduce some awesome new graphics and video integration features (more info at the PowerPoint team blog). We chose to design for Microsoft DirectX 9.0c compliant graphics processors with 64 MB video memory. These processors were widely available in 2007, and most computers available today include a graphics processor that meets or exceed this standard. However, like our CPU and RAM requirements, this requirement is targeted for typical tasks if you intensively use graphics features, you ll benefit from a more powerful GPU. If you want to verify the specs of the graphics core in your computer, the DirectX Diagnostic Tool will help: First, run dxdiag from Run. This will bring up the Diagnostic Tool. Click on the Display tab: the DirectX version your graphics processor is using is listed next to DDI Version. Unfortunately, the Diagnostic Tool does not list your video memory, but the Device information on the Display tab will help you find the manufacturer s specifications for your device. Again, to put this requirement in context, the graphics chipsets in many netbooks are capable of using up to 224 MB or 256 MB of memory which greatly exceeds our system requirement. What if I don t have a graphics processor that meets the requirement? If you re interested in upgrading from Office 2007, and you don t have a GPU that meets the requirement, don t worry you can still use Office A graphics processor that meets or exceeds the standard will help speed up some of the graphics features

4 Page 4 of 7 Comments Jorge 22 Jan :32 AM Great news! I'll probably upgrade to Office 2010 in my 3 machines: Pentium 4 HT 3GHz, 1.25GB RAM, NVIDIA GeForce MB RAM, running Windows Vista SP2 An HP laptop with a AMD Turion 64X2 1.90GHz, 2GB RAM, NVIDIA GeForce 7150M 64MB RAM with Windows Vista SP2 A Lenovo laptop with an Intel Core 2 Duo 2.01GHz, 2GB RAM, Intel GMA 4500 Integrated Graphics, running Windows 7 I hope these machines are ready for Office 2010 ;) Best regards from Peru! :D Drazick 22 Jan :33 PM Those are great news, specially harnessing the GPU. I would like to see even use of the GPU for calculating multiple charts at once via Direct Compute or something. Alex A 22 Jan :55 PM OK but office 2007 x64 will not run on xp x64? Goodbye ms office hello openoffice... Bill Bradley 22 Jan :20 PM

5 Page 5 of 7 23 Jan :04 PM Seems like there are some problem issues with 2010 client against older server versions (like 2003 server) that touch very basic features like meeting booking. You could ask why dont upgrade to 2010 server? If it's up to me, yes! But often this depends on a lot of other stuff like organisation policy. I, personally want to try beta sw because I like to explore new stuff, but when backwards compatibility is broken on a basic feature like meeting booking, I become very disappointed. What to do, uninstall Office 2010, but then, welcome to hell. Office 2010 overwrite/removes files in system32 that Outlook 2007 uses. Reinstalling outlook 2007 did not solve the problem. But reinstalling the OS does. HAPPY BETAING.. gromek chat products 23 Jan :18 PM 64 bit, YAY bricsa09 23 Jan :11 PM What about the System Requirements for the Macintosh version of Office 2010??? Rob 23 Jan :13 PM Howcome no XP 64 bit. Seems like an awful number of SERVER operating systems supported by no XP64??? bernard 23 Jan :53 PM In this topic say about ms office 2010, and teem work process and this software quality. <a herf=" rel="dofollow">bpo/kpo process</a>

6 Page 6 of 7 Ram 24 Jan :20 AM Nice to see that office 2010 has come. Gonna try it. Insurance Telemerketing 24 Jan :35 AM Ehh, you're specks SEEM great, but I'm still a hardcore Mac user. David Diskin 24 Jan :18 AM Alex, you'd rather switch to Open Office than load Windows 7? I think you ought to give Windows 7 a try. cheap computers 24 Jan :38 PM Its good,if we don't have a GPU that meets the requirement,we can still use Office 2010.its better then ms office. Yeah right Jan :34 AM yeah I'm really sure I can fun Office 2010 or 2007 on a 500MHz processor with 256MB RAM... Stop spreading BS!

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