Win 8 has less memory footprint than Win 7

One common & ongoing complaint about Windows 7 is its memory (or ram) requirements. A typical Windows 7 system can use anywhere between 1.5-2.5GB+ of RAM, while most recent systems only have around 4GB total. This is how much capacity your system has for live open programs. Many complex programs including Firefox can often use anywhere between 200-500mb of this ram as well. So what's the problem with having too little memory? Once it's maxed out, your system can take a major dive in performance as it starts to use your hard drive for memory instead.  If you don't have a fast Solid-State hard drive, then performance will drop significantly until there is free space in your memory

So Windows 8 will reduce this problem apparently by using a lot less memory in the first place with its operating system foundation (30%+ less).  Second, Microsoft has implemented a new memory organization technique into the new OS called memory combining.  This new technique will consolidate duplicate memory blocks into a single block.  Instead of cluttering memory with duplicate copies of the same block of data, it creates multiple paths to single blocks of data with no duplicates allowed.  For example, you could open 10 copies of the same image in both operating systems and Win 7 will theoretically require 10x more memory to open the image than Win 8.