Extreme Tech gives us some good speculation on how to build a Windows Vista system now. It’s based on the Beta 2 version due out in April, and a lot of surmises on the system requirements. Here’s a taster:

“… it’s likely that the Windows Vista’s feature list is now stable enough that we can predict what kind of system you’ll need to build today to accommodate the new OS. Here are a few details we do know:”

* Vista moves away from GDI/GDI+, Microsoft’s current graphics API used for the Windows desktop. Instead, Microsoft will use a desktop compositing engine built on DirectX. Each window will be its own 3D surface. There will be a fallback mode for systems that can’t handle the 3D load. Note that GDI apps will run, because a GDI layer will exist atop the Desktop Window Manager.
* Windows Vista will ship on DVD discs, so a DVD-ROM drive, at a minimum, is required.
* Microsoft is encouraging hard drive makers to develop hybrid drives. Hybrid drives with a large flash memory cache on board, probably 128MB or larger.
* The Windows scheduler has been improved to take better advantage of dual and future multicore processors.
* Support for HD-DVD will be built into the operating system.
* Versions with Media Center capability will support CableCard for HD playback over Cable TV connections, provided you’re a subscriber.

In a post titled, On the inability to support hardware that nobody makes any more, Microsoft’s Raymond Chen tells us that Windows Vista will not support older DVD drives manufactured before 2000. These drives rely on software to enforce “regional encoding”, rather than the modern hardware system.

Chen blogs that software enforcement had three problems:

* It was impossible for third-parties to compile their own CDROM.SYS from the source code in the DDK because the region code enforcement code was not included in the DDK.
* The region code enforcement code would sometimes mistake a new drive for an old one, resulting in customers unable to play DVDs. Even worse, the driver test team could not reproduce the problem reliably, and the problem went away entirely once a debugger was attached to the system.
* The code to support the older drives is complex, and the drives that the optical storage team purchased prior to January 1, 2000 are dead or dying. Consequently, testing the code that provides support for old drives has become increasingly difficult, and when the last old drive finally gives up the ghost, testing will become impossible altogether.

However, we won’t notice much difference, he claims: “Only if you have an old drive will you notice anything different, namely that encrypted/regionalized DVD movies will no longer play. And since the average drive lifetime is only three years, the number of such old drives that are still working is vanishingly small. Not even the optical drive test team can manage to keep their old drives alive that long.”

Now they tell us.