Windows 8 In Depth

Memory Requirements

Windows 8 minimum: 1GB (32-bit Windows) or 2GB (64-bit Windows)

You can run 32-bit Windows 8 on a system with 1GB of RAM, but the performance will be quite slow. Admittedly, we’ve been running beta versions of Windows 8, which are always slower than release versions because they contain debugging code and are works-in-progress as far as optimization goes. However, we believe that, for most people, 2GB is a more realistic minimum for day-to-day work on 32-bit systems. If you regularly have many programs running at the same time, if you use programs that manipulate digital photos or videos, or if you do extensive work with large files such as databases, 3GB should be your RAM goal on a 32-bit system.

Note

That “32-bitness” ...