Here's a funny story. A lady calls Pangolin and asks us about the minimum requirements to run our IMU software. There are none. So I tell her "there are none".
OK, during the conversation it comes out that she is a soccer mom. Unsophisticated computer user. Only thing she knows is that other products have "minimum requirements" and so therefore, it must be an important thing to ask. So she REALLY REALLY wants me to tell her the minimum requirements. Really, there are none...
I tell here "any PC that you can lay your hands on will work with IMU". But still that isn't good enough for her... In the end, she got so mad at us that she didn't buy our software. I think she believed we were trying to be evasive. But really -- IMU will work on any PC!!
So as a result of that "lesson", and also looking at brochures for other products, we figured we should list a "minimum requirement" of some kind.
Now, here's the deal. While working with clients recently and demonstrating QS, I installed QS on lots of PCs. Amazing vareity. QS ran on all of them.
My own PC is a P4 with only 512MB of memory. QS will indeed run on my PC but it is "tight"...
Yes, the previewing of those QuickFX does take up CPU time and you will notice a slowdown of responsiveness if you've got a "tight" PC.
And there is another factor. Although the workspace is only 100MB on disk, it expands to around 350MB in your computer's memory. My PC having only 512MB of memory -- again, is "tight".
So although QS will run on every PC we tried, we gotta list some minimum requirements -- if for no other reason, to appeas the soccer moms out there. And we've also got to have some kind of "headroom" so if someone starts complaining about "hey, these QuickFX make it choppy on my P4 computer" we can come back with "we told you so"...
We also plan on adding more to QS. More capabilities (which will require more CPU speed) and more real laser shows which, if we put them into the same workspace, is clearly going to take more memory. So we list a "minimum requirement" which is really greater than is needed today, just so we have some headroom for tomorrow.
These days I doubt you could even buy a computer without a dual-core processor and a gig of ram. I don't think that's an unreasonable requirement. So that's why we put it there.
Bill