I have Windows 8 running on two systems. The first system is my wife's laptop, a HP Pavillion with 4 gigs of ram, where I installed the 64 bit version on a new SSD drive. The original OS was Vista. The system flies, it takes 30 seconds to log in. With Vista it would take about 5 minutes for the system to boot!. My wife is a novice and it took her some time to get used to the interface and now that she has she really likes it.

The second system is an old IBM ThinkCentre with a P4 and 2.5 gigs of ram. I installed the 32 bit version of Windows 8 onto a new SSD drive. I can be logged in and in my email in 30 seconds. It's so much faster!

So far neither my wife or I have felt limited in what we do on our systems and we really like Windows 8. You just need to spend a little time learning the new interface.