Hi Mjsto466,
Like they said the core 2 duo would be enough... but it would not be fun to use, really slow compare to what you could have today for fairly cheap.
I use an i5 with 8 gigs of ram. When I record in Reaper it's using about half of that memory so 8 is enough, lower then that I believe you might feel your computer slow with today's OS and applications.
Here is a chart that has most of the available cpu on the market that will give you a good idea of how good a CPU is compare to the others:
I would recommend anything higher than the lowest i3 in that picture.
It's also good to have two hard drive (or atleast partitions), one for Windows and one for saving your projects. That way if your Windows doesn't boot anymore or have any other problems your files are safe. In the best world you could get an ssd of a couple hundred gigs for Windows and a normal hard drive for your files.
I don't know where you live but here in Canada you can have these 2 CPUs that are ones of the cheapest cpus and are high on the benchmark:
i3-8350k 209.88$ can
i5-8400 248$ can
8 gig of ram is about 85$ can.
And the rest... (motherboard around 100, ssd for 120 gig 60$, 55$ for 1To normal harddrive, power supply 45$, case 40$, keyboard mouse 20$)
So you can have a really good machine for around 614-653$ canadian, not even 500$ US! In the US I'm pretty sure you could have even a better price than what we have her on top of that. And with that machine I can garantee you that you won't feel the need for more power in many years to come.