What are the minimal hardware requirements of Mathematica?

Mathematica adapts very well to a variety of environments and is capable of taking advantage of whatever resources are made available to it. The minimum requirements are very small and so Mathematica should be able to run on any of the supported platforms.

Mathematica requires very little memory to start up, but once you start performing large calculations, the memory requirements can grow quickly. The exact memory requirements cannot be provided since it depends on the problem being tackled. Simple calculations require very little memory, but large calculations such as large matrix operations and graphics may require more. Keep the problem to be solved in mind when choosing a computer on which to install Mathematica.

The following table represents a good place to start for beginning calculations in Mathematica and should allow small- to medium-sized calculations to be carried out without any problems.

Download Size	500 MB*
Minimum Memory Requirement	256 MB
Recommended Memory	512 MB or greater
Hard Drive	3.0 GB*

Please note that the required hard drive space reduces to 1.5* GB if you delete the downloaded installer and the copy that the installer creates of itself in /Wolfram Research/Downloads after you have successfully installed Mathematica to your machine.

Most computers purchased today easily meet these requirements so minimum system requirements should not be a concern in most cases.

Download this FAQ as a Mathematica 6.0 Notebook

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