When Microsoft Research launched Worldwide Telescope, I thought the mandatory hardware requirement is 3D graphic card with 128 MB or 256MB RAM. While a Celeron CPU with 512 MB RAM should enough to run Worldwide Telescope.But when I logon to Worldwide Telescope website and read the minimum hardware requirement, I was completely wrong.
Here's the minimum hardware requirement stated on Worldwide Telescope website.
Microsoft® XP SP2 (minimum), Windows® Vista® (recommended)
PC with Intel Core 2 Duo processor with 2 gigahertz (GHz) or faster, recommended
1 gigabyte (GB) of RAM; 2 GB RAM recommended
3D accelerated card with 128 megabytes (MB) RAM; discrete graphics card with dedicated 256-MB VRAM recommended for higher performance.
Compared to my office machine,
Windows Vista Ultimate
Intel Pentium Dual-Core E2160 1.8 GHz
2 GB RAM with 256 MB assigned to onboard VIA Chrome9 HC IGP
The only reason that will stop my machine from running this program could be my processor.
So, I download Microsoft Worldwide Telescope software to give it a try.
Luckily, Microsoft Worldwide Telescope running smoothly. Maybe there’s not so much different between 1.8 MHz and 2.0MHz processor.
I think I will try this software on my E2140 1.6GHz officemate machine to see if Microsoft Worldwide Telescope can run on it.
By the way, here’s the screenshot from the Microsoft Worldwide Telescope
1. Looking at Sky: Ant Nebula
2. Looking at earth
Logon to www.worldwidetelescope.org to download Microsoft Worldwide Telescope
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