Should I switch my other PC's to 8?

My main is already 8, while my other 3 test computers are all XP. I know how XP won't be supported soon, but what do you guys think?

Thanks, friends!

512 GB of RAM
(will I need to upgrade RAM to 1 GB?)

Well, it's only $40 a piece to upgrade them, so $120 is certainly the cheapest route in the past few years. If you don't really use the other computers all of the time though, I'm not sure that I would bother upgrading them. Sure XP only has support for a few more years, but will you really still be using these older machines in a few years?

I never upgraded my wife's laptop from Vista to 7, and I don't plan to move it to 8. Vista is still working fine and nothing is really broken. No sense in taking a chance to make things worse.

I would highly recommend upgrade in this case. If you were running W7, I wouldn't have said that. But W8 is better than XP any day. Not only do you have good support but you will find that you are able to run a lot of new programs which are incompatible with XP. I don't consider W8 better than 7. It's different and I love it. At the same time I love 7 as much as I do 8. But since you are running XP and not 7 and upgrade price is just $40, go for the upgrade. Plus, W8 is very light, I mean it doesn't use up much resources, it would run very smoothly in your XP machines. I think the 32 bit version might run with 512 MB RAM.

The hardware specification might help deciding whether to or not. System with 512mb RAM, or processors that older than dual core may be better stick to XP till it is really ended. Running Win 7 or 8 with less than 2 GB RAM is actually OK but we may have it occasionally slowing down. I still have few systems with Pentium 4 and 1 gb RAM running XP for normal office works.

Kevin

I'd plop a gig into those systems as 512 is anorexic these days. Overall, I'd say yes, go for it as Windows 8 actually runs nicer on xp era machines than xp. No joke. Graphically is better, personalization is better, and performance is fairly clean and will probably breathe a breath of fresh air into those puters. Another consideration would be is if those machines are used often enough to justify the upgrade. My personal suggestion would be to try and partition the hard drives and dual boot the machines with xp and 8 to see if the graphics drivers in Windows 8 will work properly with the older hardware. I've come across an elder HP machine that was built in 2005-6 and its graphics driver works great in Windows 7 as the driver is supported by Windows Updates and displays the proper native screen resolution. In 8, everything works fine except that the driver from 7 doesn't install as it claims it isn't digitally signed or I think wasn't supported. So, it could only display in three non-native screen resolutions. But on another xp machine that was vista ready (theoretically as it only has 512 MB of RAM) everything worked fine and ran fine. Actually I retract my first sentence. If the machines are used for light work scenarios such as Office and interwebsting, and Windows 8 runs fine on them as well, you could probably skimp out the extra RAM as I remember Windows only taking about 200 or so MBs of RAM, and this was with Office apps and other things running as well.

Arpan said:

Not only do you have good support but you will find that you are able to run a lot of new programs which are incompatible with XP.

Click to expand...

However, if these are 3 older computers that you don't really use much, and are light in resources anyway (512MB of RAM), are you really going to install many new apps and try to use them? It really depends to me upon what the user does with their primary computer and how powerful it is. I'll be honest, I rarely, if ever use my old AMD dual core box with 4GB of RAM and my Nvidia 7600GT, when I have my new quad core box with 8GB of RAM and my SSD's and my Nvidia 570GTX. So, that old computer runs XP and more or less runs my scanner which doesn't have a 32bit driver and is used occasionally by my kids to play around on the web. There really isn't a compelling reason whatsoever to spend $40 on that hardware. I would prefer to put the $40 towards either a new computer or parts for my existing higher end box.

Win8 has a low footprint on the computers so you should not have to worry about doing any substantial memory or CPU upgrades. I plan to move all of my machines over soon but I am in the same quandary: they are running fine as they are, why bother?

It depends, you should run the hardware upgrade advisor on those computers. If you run the setup program you should be able to run the advisor.

Thanks!
My plan is to dual-boot and test the drivers, although one of the computers wont use games already.

1 GiB coming soon, to 3 computers near me!