According to the latest Longhorn requirements, keyboards and mice must not connect to the pc via PS/2 or Serial ports, and the BIOS must automatically support USB keyboards and mice. The document has some more interesting information. All monitors will have to be at the 16:9 or 16:10 aspect ratios, and connect to the PC via DVI rather than d-sub. The 32bit system BIOS will have to support frame buffers of over 256MB for graphics accelerators, and a 64bit system BIOS will have to support at least 4GB dedicated RAM for graphic accelerators. USB 2.0 ports, and several of them, including a manditory 2 in the front make the list, along with manditory DVD Burners, S/PDIF out with support for 7.1 channels, and Gigabit ethernet, or 802.11 g/a support.
DEV-INP-02 New! Physically removable keyboards and mice connect to the PC by means other than PS/2 or the Serial (RS232) port
Externally attached (that is, physically removable) keyboards and mice must not use PS/2 or Serial (RS232) port for connectivity with the PC.
There is no decision for minimum CPU or memory, but I’m guessing a 32bit system will have to have a 3Ghz processor and 4GB DDR2 ram. 64bit systems will have to be at least a dual core 2.8Ghz chip with at least ~6GB of DDR2 memory. These are my estimates for a desktop pc, for a laptop, a Pentium M compatible, 2GHz ish processor (Dual core will probably required also) with about 2GB memory.
Longhorn better be something spectacular if all this stuff that MS is pushing for is actually needed.
-John Havlik
[end of transmission, stay tuned]