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Generally speaking, your desktop or laptop was built to work with a particular operating system in mind.
Even with that, as Deadly points out, if you buy a computer that barely meets the required specifications for the OS it was supposedly "built" for, you can get screwed.
Sometimes, you can switch your old computer to Linux and squeeze a few more years of usefulness out of it. I'm punching this post out on a 7 year old Dell Inspiron laptop running Ubuntu.
With all of that being said, I was pleasantly surprised when I upgraded my three year old Fujitsu convertible laptop from Windows 7 to Windows 8. I have had no issues with the transition at all. The tablet is much faster and much more responsive. Everything works and it boots up in 30 seconds or less. It used to take 2-3 minutes to boot with Windows 7. I would have moved on to a newer convertible tablet by now if I hadn't upgraded the OS on the current one.