Windows® 8.1 IN DEPTH

2. Installing or Upgrading Windows 8.1

Windows 8.1 System Requirements

Personal computing is governed by two inexorable, and not unrelated, “laws”:

Moore’s Law—Processing power doubles every 18 months (from Gordon Moore, cofounder of Intel).

Parkinson’s Law of Data—Data expands to fill the space available for storage (from the original Parkinson’s Law: Work expands to fill the time available).

These two observations help explain why, when the computers we use are becoming increasingly powerful, our day-to-day tasks never really seem all that much faster. The leaps in processing power and memory are being matched by the increasing complexity and resource requirements of the latest programs. Therefore, the computer you’re using today might be ...