What you'll need to get Wireshark up and running ...
The values below are the minimum requirements and only "rules of thumb" for use on a moderately used network
Working with a busy network can easily produce huge memory and disk space usage! For example: Capturing on a fully saturated 100MBit/s Ethernet will produce ~ 750MBytes/min! Having a fast processor, lots of memory and disk space is a good idea here.
If Wireshark is running out of memory it crashes, see: http://wiki.wireshark.org/KnownBugs/OutOfMemory for details and workarounds
Wireshark won't benefit much from Multiprocessor/Hyperthread systems (except perhaps during an "Update list of packets in real time" capture, where capturing traffic runs in one process and dissecting and displaying packets runs in another process, and the two processes could run on two processors).
Windows 2000, XP Home, XP Pro, XP Tablet PC, XP Media Center or Server 2003 (XP Pro recommended)
32-bit Pentium or alike (recommended: 400MHz or greater), 64-bit processors in WoW64 emulation, see remarks below
128MB RAM system memory (recommended: 256MBytes or greater)
60MB available disk space (plus size of user's capture files, e.g. 100MB extra)
800*600 (1280*1024 or higher recommended) resolution with at least 256 colors
A supported network card for capturing:
Ethernet: any card supported by Windows should do
WLAN: see the MicroLogix support list, no capturing of 802.11 headers and non-data frames
Other media: See http://wiki.wireshark.org/CaptureSetup/NetworkMedia
Remarks:
Windows Vista should work, but as it's still beta you might encounter new bugs
Windows 95, 98, ME and NT won't work with Wireshark. The last known version to work was Ethereal 0.99.0 (which includes WinPcap 3.1). The libraries Wireshark depends on are no longer supporting these systems. BTW: Microsoft no longer supports 98/ME since July 11, 2006!
Windows CE and the embedded (NT/XP) versions are not supported!
64-bit processors run Wireshark in 32 bit emulation (called WoW64), at least WinPcap 4.0 beta 1 is required for that
Multi monitor setups are supported but may behave a bit strangely
Wireshark currently runs on most UNIX platforms. The system requirements should be comparable to the Windows values listed above.
Binary packages are available for at least the following platforms:
Apple Mac OS X
Debian GNU/Linux
FreeBSD
Gentoo Linux
HP-UX
Mandriva Linux
NetBSD
OpenPKG
Red Hat Fedora/Enterprise Linux
rPath Linux
Sun Solaris/i386
Sun Solaris/Sparc
If a binary package is not available for your platform, you should download the source and try to build it. Please report your experiences to wireshark-dev[AT]wireshark.org .