What hardware do you need to upgrade from XP to either Windows 7 or 8? If you bought your computer before 2006, you may as well forget about it. Here is the minimum: a 1GHz or faster processor, 1GB of RAM (2GB for 64-bit), 16GB of hard drive space (20GB for 64-bit) and a DirectX 9 graphics device with WDDM 1.0 or higher.





Yes, either OS will run on that configuration, but you will probably be cussing out the system. For either OS to run smoothly, you should ideally have at least a dual-core CPU and 4GB of RAM.

What about upgrading the hardware? You will still face these drawbacks: you will still be lacking modern technologies like 802.11n (or 802.11ac) wireless networking, gigabit ethernet and USB 3.0.

Consider that you can buy a new system from Best Buy that has 4GB of RAM, 1TB hard drive, gigabit ethernet, 802.11n wireless, and USB 3.0 ports for just over $300.

If you really don't want to upgrade, there is always Linux.