The Microsoft Partner Conference is always a good source of information.  This makes things intriguing for Win8.  If it truly runs on vista class machines then it’ll run on my 5 year old notebook(which currently run win7) just fine.

Worried that you’ll have to buy a new PC in order to be able to run Windows 8? Don’t! Microsoft has said that the Windows 8 system requirements will be the same, or perhaps even lower, than those of Windows 7.Speaking at the 2011 Worldwide Partner Conference, Tami Reller, corporate vice president of Microsoft’s Windows division, had this to say:“In both of our Windows 8 previews, we talked about continuing with the important trend that we started with Windows 7, keeping system requirements either flat or reducing them over time. Windows 8 will be able to run on a wide range of machines because it will have the same requirements or lower.”So if Windows 8 has the same system requirements that Windows 7 had, that should mean that Windows 8 will also run on systems that currently have Windows Vista installed on them.As a reminder, here are the Windows 7 system requirements:1GHz CPU1GB RAM 32-bit or 2GB RAM 64-bit16 GB hard disk space 32-bit or 20 GB 64-bitDirectX 9 graphics device with WDDM 1.0 or higher driver

via Windows 8 will run on all Windows 7 PCs and Vista PCs too | ZDNet.