That being said, I think many people underestimated increased processing power over ages.
1gb of ram on win 7 equals 4 times of 256 mb win 98 era. With 8gb it's 32 times larger. That's just ram though, not to mention processing power between pentium 3-4 with multicore i series.
The difference in ram caching and cpu processing is big that some additional process won't give much problem.