Windows 8 Will Run On All Current PC Hardware

Stoobalou writes "Microsoft exec Tami Reller told attendees at the company's Worldwide Partner Conference 2011 taking place in Los Angeles yesterday that any PC capable of running Windows 7 today would be capable of running Windows 8 when it is released, towards the end of the year."

It's almost like

[jdpars]

It's almost like an operating system doesn't need to amp up its requirements with every new release. Once it gets to a certain point, really, there's no need for an increase in necessary resources. Sure, you can make it scale well and perform better, but it really shouldn't be hard to keep the minimum fairly low.

Not quite accurate

[hawguy]

The article title is not quite accurate:

Windows 8 Will Run On All Current PC Hardware

Then it goes on to say

any PC capable of running Windows 7 today would be capable of running Windows 8

I have a lot of PC's in regular use that run XP quite happily but won't run Win7. I guess the next OS for that hardware will be Xubuntu.

Re:Why hello there!

[beelsebob]

It's actually the first time I've seen the new UI, and I had two responses...

Initially I thought "wow, that's such a massive change they should drop the windows name, windows 8 doesn't do the change justice". Then when I saw that normal Windows apps dump you straight down to a windows 7 desktop I thought "wow, all they've done is a motorola... They've tacked an additional UI layer on top of the existing one and created an ugly cludge that doesn't work right in either scenario".

If I had been MS I honestly would have taken the opportunity to start again with Windows – call it something new, make it their OS X. Some of the stuff in there is cool – like the fact that in the Windows 8 UI you can easily access "files" stored in another application's DB, but it doesn't seem to fit together right – what happens when you want to access that "file" in the windows 7 layer?

All in all, it's very MS – it's a cool idea, but they've not gone the whole hog and rejigged everything, they've tried to maintain compatibility and in doing so created something that doesn't work right.