Office 2010 Limits Hardware Hit

Office 2010 will run on most computers that can handle Office 2007, according to preliminary hardware requirements released in Jan. 2010. The requirements suggest that many organizations will be able to upgrade existing Office 2007 installations in place to Office 2010. However, some computers currently on Office 2003 will not run Office 2010, which requires more processor power and twice as much memory as the 2003 suite.

Office 2010 requires the same minimum memory (256MB) and processor speed (500MHz) as Office 2007, but it requires more disk space; for example, Office 2010 Professional Plus requires 3GB versus 2GB for the 2007 version. Certain features, such as grammar and contextual spell checking in Word, do not function in a computer with less than 1GB of memory. (The company no longer publishes the generally higher “recommended” hardware specification for processor speed and memory.)

For Office 2010, Microsoft also recommends a graphics processor (DirectX 9.0c-compatible with 64MB of memory, or better). Graphics processors meeting the requirement were widely available in 2007 and most computers today include them, but Office 2010 can run adequately on computers that don’t meet the requirement if the user does not employ graphics-intensive features, such as the new video editor in PowerPoint 2010.