Officially, you can run a stripped-down version of Vista without a video card in a PC or a stand-alone graphics processor in a laptop -- but you might not want to.
"To realize the charm and brilliance of Vista, the user has to have a decent graphics card, because otherwise it looks like crap: It is all washed up and the colors look bad,"
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When installing Vista, the operating system automatically assesses your system and adapts itself to your PC's CPU, memory and graphics-processing capabilities. But as our test showed, Vista on a PC with a 2-GHz CPU and 1 GB of RAM with a stand-alone graphics processor disabled does not look that great and certainly does not deliver what Microsoft calls a full "Vista experience."
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"Even with a (high-powered graphics processor), Vista extracts performance and more battery life, so it is pretty yet costly in terms of machine resources," said Nathan Brookwood of Insight64. "With a notebook environment when you are not plugged into the wall, you may very well want to turn off the extra graphics because your battery is going to get sucked up."