Easy there, tiger. I just upgraded a Dell Latitude E6500 with 4Gb of RAM and an Athlon 5050e desktop also with 4 Gb from XP to Windows 8 Pro. Anecdotally, both

Easy there, tiger. I just upgraded a Dell Latitude E6500 with 4Gb of RAM and an Athlon 5050e desktop also with 4 Gb from XP to Windows 8 Pro. Anecdotally, both boot faster and run Office 2010 faster than when they were running XP. This major upgrade has required no new hardware, except for a Logitech QuickCam Pro for which there is no 64-bit driver. I can probably run the desktop for another 5 years now.