I just replaced a maybe 10 year old XP machine with a £200 ($400?) base unit for someone in my family.. admittedly they don't make music.. but they a Time PC is prolly an antique now haha. I got to a point where I couldn't upgrade it further and single core / 1.5 gb wasn't cutting it.

if your arehappy with what it does, and don't use it online and don't want to upgrade at all.. stay as you are

otherwise, cough up some $ and move forward.. you might be far happier in the sense of if you use VST's where the cpu a lot of the time has far less work as a result.

I had to explain to the family member the pc was like a car, where it got to a point where it was cheaper just to ditch it rather than upgrade again. (yes linux is more forgiving on older cpu's , but they didn't like it)


that old pc is probably  become a NAS or something as it's still perfectly capable of doing that.

I backed out of Win8 mostly because of the fact that Win8 cannot be backed out of... it requires a full re-install of 7 :( I need more info on 8 before I personally make the plunge because I have a lot of software that runs fine and dandy on 7. I saw a quantum leap from XP Pro to 7 x64... for those who have used 8 is it a significant difference from 7 to 8?

I did some research on my software/hardware configuration prior to performing a clean install of Windows 8 on my primary DAW.

I happened to have had some free time and just decided to make the plunge to Windows 8 Pro x64, knowing that I had all of the software to just as easily wipe it all out and go back to Windows 7 Ultimate x64 through a clean install - if I needed or chose to.

I do not happen to care for the Metro interface much at all, but I have an actve tile that takes me to my familiar Desktop, and I just work primary from there, so it is not any kind of issue for me on that.

I do wish they had left the Start Menu available as a supported choice, but I just bound my most frequently used applications to the Task Bar, or made them active tiles to be accessed from the Metro interface when needed.

Other than those changes I chose to make as described above, I am using Windows 8 with no issues whatsoever.  I CAN say that Windows 7 Ultimate x64 is a wonderfully stable platform for running Sonar and ally of my other applications - I did not NEED to go to Windows 8 - but because everything on my system works just fine on Windows 8, I will likely remain on Windows 8 and not worry one bit about it.

Again, I urge you to research your configuration to make sure all will run on Windows 8, but other than that - which is common sense really, moving to it is quite painless.  At the same time, there is nothing at all wrong with staying happily on Windows 7.  The one move I would advise anyone to ABSOLUTELY make is to get themselves onto a 64-bit OS if at all possible, to take advantage of addressable memory over 4 GB, if they are for whatever reason running a 32-bit OS of any flavor.  (of course, that supposes that they are either on or moving to hardware that supports running in 64-bit fashion).

Anyways, that's my 2 cents, 

Bob Bone

As cheap as high-capacity drives are now -

Setup your PC to dual-boot Windows XP and Windows 7.
(I'm doing that now - works fine!)
+1 on Windows 7 64-bit so you can use the extra RAM!

You can always add Windows 8 later when some of the 'new' wears off, and could probably add it as a 3rd operating system option...

Windows 7 x64 is a nice stable platform.  Windows 8 x64 has some annoyances, but those are quickly able to be dealt with, and as long as there are drivers for what you are using, it seems to work fine.

I could have gone back to Win 7, but since I mitigated the things about Windows 8 I did not care for, it runs everything I use just fine.  Any new computers are going to be coming with Windows 8, and it's really no big deal - again as long as the drivers are there.

Bob Bone