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Comment by Yrlec | Hacker News Reader

The big question though is if sales are falling because people are switching to tablets/smartphones entirely or because they are buying tablets for a subset of their use cases. I'm a big PC fan and I would never replace my laptop with a tablet as my primary computing device. However, my next purchase will be a tablet, because I don't have one at the moment and it's great for surfing the web from the sofa. The marginal return of purchasing tablet is therefore higher. That doesn't mean my PC is going anywhere soon.

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Another possibility is that older PCs are still good enough. My 4 year old Core 2 Duo MacBook with an SSD has felt speedy enough for all my day-to-day tasks (including driving a 24" display) that I just haven't bothered upgrading.

How well do Windows 7 and 8 perform on older hardware?

A computer that came with XP (let's say prior to 2006? 2005?) will probably still run faster with XP (though XP is literally 12 years old now..). However, from what I understand a computer that came with Vista will run faster with Windows 7, and faster still with Windows 8.

Vista upped system requirements from XP, but since then, MS has lowered system requirements and OS footprint on each release.

Remember though that there are PCs that were genuinely quite good (back then) which came with XP and then could also easily run Vista. This is sort of what I was trying to get at with the 2005/2006 limit. Meaning that some PCs that came with XP might still be able to run faster with Win7/8. Just don't count on it if you got it in 2001 :)

As tablet hardware and software becomes more capable, I would expect to see PC hardware sales drop. There may never be a perfect convergence where, for example, it's possible to develop tablet software on a tablet. But as the use cases increase particularly for content creation, less people need the capability of a full PC.

I suggest keeping an eye on the Atom-based Windows 8 tablets. These tablets run full Windows 8, with the ability to run Win32 apps, not just Windows RT. I haven't tried to run Visual Studio on such a tablet yet, but it seems feasible.

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