[AnotherCat]

In my view claims that one will run into problems with XP era applications under Win 8 is in the main just smoke. Some of my old applications were the likes of real time software modems for a wide variety of communications protocols, positioning, etc., so not just the run of the mill stuff, and when I tried those they all ran fine. Most things ran obviously faster.

In the unlikely event one has a special purpose XP application that is locked to a specific operating system in order to protect its security or stability, as I did, I found on a Win 8 machine with the application installed on a virtual XP machine, that from power on, through starting the virtual machine and application start was actually faster than power on through to application started on a bare XP machine. Whereas previously using a virtual XP machine with Win 7 was so slow in starting that it was not worth doing.

I won't get into hardware except to say everything that ran under Win 7 ran fine for me (in fact better in some instances, and in the case of some XP era serial converters that had not worked under Vista and Win 7 they started working again with Win 8), and that for XP era hardware using consumables it can likely be replaced with new for less than the cost of a set of consumables for the old).