I suppose it's anecdotal, but I had a desktop machine with 4GB of ram that was bought for Windows XP. It dealt well with Windows 7, but the moment I upgraded to

I suppose it's anecdotal, but I had a desktop machine with 4GB of ram that was bought for Windows XP. It dealt well with Windows 7, but the moment I upgraded to Windows 8 I noticed it was very slow. Unwilling to spend time tweaking it, I downgraded immediately. Now I'm a developer. My mother on the other hand kept a Windows XP laptop running on a Celeron M processor and 1GB of memory. It felt snappy enough; but I wouldn't trust it to run Windows 10 applications because while Windows itself might dial down enough, something like Chrome will happily gobble 500GB of memory because it thinks it can.