Being that Windows 8 is being developed primarily for low powered computers, like tablets, and from what I've hard & read, Windows 8 will run quite easily on anything that was built to run Vista & up. Even many XP based computers can run it, if there's room (and power) for a dedicated GPU. Many cards can be bought for under $100 that will work perfectly fine. It doesn't have to be the bleeding edge type of card.
So I figure that my low spec HP MS214 AIO, specs here:
HP Pavilion MS214 Review - ComputerShopper.com Should run it quite well. It's ran everything that I've installed on it, from all versions of XP, including the 64 bit version, Vista SP2 x64, and it's primary OS is Win 7 Pro x64. I did upgrade the RAM to 4GB & the HDD to a 1TB Caviar Black. And this CPU will be a drop in replacement, it's about 20% more powerful.
AMD Athlon Neo X2 6850e - ADJ6850IAA5DO Mine is a 22 watt also. Going from 1.5GHz to 1.8GHz will be an improvement, as well as having a hyper-threaded CPU. The one that I have now is really neutered.
I feel that it should run Windows 8 quite nicely, once I evaluate it further, then I'll decide what to do. But one thing for sure, Windows 8 won't need as much resources as prior versions of Windows. And I also feel that the desktop is here to stay, no matter how many articles that we run across. Right now, tablets are the hot ticket. But although desktop sales have slid, there's many, many PC's in homes & offices all over the world. The economy has been bad, and many users have either kept what they have, and many, like myself, have upgraded what we have, and will continue to do so. The PC is far from dead.
When I bought this desktop, I said to myself, that it'll make it through 2 Windows releases, Windows 7 & whatever version is next. 6 to 7 years. When I buy another one, it'll be when the 128 bit CPU's come out, and it's certain that there will be one within another couple of years. Perhaps they're waiting for XP's support to end, so that we won't have tons of "what should I buy, 32, 64 or 128 bit?". That topic has settled down, but it will come up again at that point. Not having 32 bit to deal with any longer will help a lot.
Cat