Memory and other upgrades for photo editing

Windows 8's system requirements are no different than Windows 7.  It is little better at memory management and a little quicker here and there, but nothing that would make your experience noticeably faster with your photo work.

I'd be more curious in finding out what is eating into all your memory.  Take a peak at Task Manager and see what applications are consuming the most Physical Memory when your photo apps are not running.  That is where I would start.

Before recently upgrading my machine, I was running Lightroom 4 comfortably on Windows 7 Ultimate x64 with 8GB of RAM.  Only when I started to do some photo merging in PS for some panoramic pictures or some 1080P video editing did I start hitting the ceiling pretty regularly.  But that panoramic was from stitching together several 12MP pictures while working with multiple filters.  My newest setup has 16GB of RAM and I have yet to fully tax it.

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Paul