April 27th, 2006
IE7 on a 66 MHz 486? MS says it's a cut-n-paste error.
Yesterday, ZDNet reader Bruce Arnold received an email from Microsoft regarding the most recently issued beta version of Internet Explorer 7. Arnold forwarded a copy to ZDNet wondering whether the system requirements portion of the email could actually be so. According to the email and to the correpsonding Web page on Microsoft’s site (cropped screen shot pictured below), users who wanted to try IE7 could get by with a 66 MHz 486-class processsor and 32MB of RAM.
Meanwhile, it also needs Windows XP SP2 which by itself would choke to death on such paltry resources. So, I checked with Microsoft Internet Plaforms and Security marketing director Gary Schare. Via email Schare wrote:
The people building the new IE7 web site grabbed the IE6 system requirements because IE7 has the same requirements as IE6 when running on XP SP2. But IE6 also ran on some older versions of Windows with lower system requirements. So the IE6 system requirements page reflected the “true minimum” which was a 486 CPU with 32MB of RAM….We are updating the IE7 system requirements page tonight. It will reflect the XP SP2 requirements from http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/sp2/sysreqs.mspx.
But, when I checked the system requirements Web page this morning (at 9:30AM ET), it was still showing "486/66."
| 04/27/06
