Microsoft says 8 GB of RAM should be enough for anyone running Windows 11

Microsoft has added four new items to the to-do list it set itself to improve the quality of Windows 11. Redmond's list landed in March 2026 in response to users' anger at Windows 11 becoming increasingly flaky and needy. Pavan Davuluri, Microsoft's executive VP for Windows and Devices, promised "improved memory efficiency, …

[MachDiamond]

Only?

Here I was thinking that they may have said 640k is more than enough.

Oldtimers?

[ComputerSays_noAbsolutelyNo]

Re: Only?

In the age of AI slop: 64 GB ain't enough

[steviesteveo]

Re: Only?

That's ultimately it. The fact that email and facebook machines struggle with 8GB really is a quality issue

[TReko]

Re: Only?

The solution is to give top execs and programmers machines with only 8GB.

Then they will have to fix up their slop code.

[MachDiamond]

Re: Only?

"The solution is to give top execs and programmers machines with only 8GB."

Before the Wall came down, I got a copy of a BEM application used for magnetics that ran on a bare bones IBM-PC. The code was super optimized and a really amazing bit of work. That PC was all they could get and it beat using a slide rule.

It's a lot like getting a bigger home leads to accumulating more crap. The void gets filled. Software (especially an OS) just keeps growing. If 8gb of RAM has been the norm for a while, forcing the need for 16gb isn't that big of an ask, right? Did I mention that my media production machine has 96gb of RAM? To think, I started on a Mac 512k!

[JLV]

Re: Only?

Thing is, these days RAM ain’t cheap.

Microsoft could end up a bit like the hapless US car manufacturers after the 1974 OPEC oil shock: known for wastefulness and not much else.

[Jedit]

"8 GB of RAM should be enough for anyone"

Based on past projections, we should thus expect somewhere between 48GB and 192GB to be the actual requirement.

Or we could just stop using what should be more accurately named Plagiarised Information Sorting Systems.

[Blazde]

Re: "8 GB of RAM should be enough for anyone"

48GB

Well, there's your problem.. You're trying to run a web browser as well as Windows all at the same time aren't you?

[Gavsky]

Re: "8 GB of RAM should be enough for anyone"

Exactly! I get around this issue by running Windows & all software at a maximum resolution of 160 × 200, in black & white. That sometimes helps & anything higher is dangerous futurism...

[BPontius]

Re: "8 GB of RAM should be enough for anyone"

Fancy pants!! I get characters sticking together above 60 x 90 in green monochrome text. Need to change the print fluid in my monitor.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Only?

LOL … has Copilot scraped SoftRAM or MagnaRAM off the Internet Archive and recoded them in Rust ??

With deep deep irony, Intel shuttered the Optane product line in 2022. AI would have been all over that.

[xyz]

Who cares anymore....

This was never about actual software. This is what happens when management strategy takes a giant dump on users. "Fixing" Windows needs management heads on poles not "cuddly" tweaks.

[Eye Know]

Re: Who cares anymore....

100%, Microsoft need to change direction, customers are pissed off.

[FirstTangoInParis]

Re: Who cares anymore....

Force MS Execs to use only 8 GB RAM and see how they like it. It’s unbelievably awful. 16 gig minimum kids and you might just get through your day without defenestrating your laptop.

[chuckufarley]

“The signal from you is clear: keep going. We intend to,” he wrote...

...And for a long time now the signal I have been sending is "Just go bankrupt already! You don't have a clue what it takes to increase sales." No matter how bad we get, humanity does not actually deserve to live though Microsoft's death throes. It is within their power to spare us. But they won't. They think they still matter.

[DJV]

Re: “The signal from you is clear: keep going. We intend to,” he wrote...

Damn - you beat me to it, though my response was going to be somewhat shorter and involve the word "off".

[Paul Herber]

Re: “The signal from you is clear: keep going. We intend to,” he wrote...

Your off-beat reply is somewhat off-putting, more an off-the-cuff remark, in an offhand way.

[DJV]

Re: “The signal from you is clear: keep going. We intend to,” he wrote...

How offensive of you to point this out! I'll just bugger, er, off in that case.

[Bebu sa Ware]

Re: “The signal from you is clear: keep going. We intend to,” he wrote..

A threat I think certainly not reassuring. More in the line of "the beatings will continue…"

Nearly thirty years ago I clearly recall expressly saying to a hopeful soul "I don't do Windows" and suggesting they go to the desktop support team - but might as well have been to buggery. Ever so glad I did. ;) Still not keen on ladders either.

Windows was a lost cause pretty much from the outset, certainly desktop Windows.

NT4 wasn't too bad for hanging those pestilent floating licensing dongles off. I got cluey about proprietary Windows only software in the disciplines I was supporting, discovering that many had offered Unix and Linux versions in the past from which you could often extract the Flexlm vendor demon and serve the licenses from a Unix or Linux box.

(You can be pretty sure that the original software vendor had used a contractor to add the "licensing sauce" and even after, or because of, countless M&As, has never been touched again.)

I am certain the Devil runs Hades on Windows… I am confident he would never be short of Windows admins. :)

[Gary Stewart]

Re: “The signal from you is clear: keep going. We intend to,” he wrote...

I think they had record profits in the last quarter mainly due to Azure. I've been wanting for them to fade away into oblivion for decades. Instead my chances of me seeing it happen are fading away. "Life, don't talk to me about life" seems appropriate for this one.

[Peter Gathercole]

Re: “The signal from you is clear: keep going. We intend to,” he wrote...

I think that the Azure revenues are enough to keep Microsoft afloat for a while, as long as they don't bet the whole farm on AI datacentres.

[Will Godfrey]

Re: “The signal from you is clear: keep going. We intend to,” he wrote...

So they are going to sink then?

[LessWileyCoyote]

"perhaps because people just don’t see much value in paying extra for an AI-capable PC"

Winner winner chicken dinner.

[Pirate Peter]

Re: "perhaps because people just don’t see much value in paying extra for an AI-capable PC"

or perhaps the majority of people see no value in AI Slop

with more and more companies blocking the AI SLURP BOTS from their website quality training data is getting harder to find, a lot of the slop comes from social media, or like Microsoft using GitHub repo's to train LLM's for coding, hence a lot of projects are being frozen or moved to non AI slurping platforms

also people think all the new LLM model are vast improvements? nope, they have to keep releasing new models as they old LLM's aren't train on new data, they can use data inputed by users to add to an LLM but don't usually add large new datasets to existing LLM, they want to keep that for the new LLM or people will keep using the old LLM and the AI companies can't make more money

[may_i]

Welcome to purgatory

"Making voice more natural and fluid to interact across the apps you use every day."

It's obvious that this guy doesn't have to work in the same open plan torture as his minions if he can't see the problem with a room full of people all trying to talk to their computer.

[Benegesserict Cumbersomberbatch]

Re: Welcome to purgatory

I'm glad he doesn't work in mine either. I won't have to parse sentences like that one, nor substitute English for whatever corporatespeak he has learned.

[RobboLovesData]

horse has bolted

I'm sure they will stick it behind a licence fee for enterprise

[Evilgoat76]

Re: horse has bolted

Bolted? It's bolted sired an entire new bloodline and died!

[Doctor Syntax]

"Redmond adds new items to its make-Windows-better list"

There's a design philosophy that says a design is complete when there's nothing more that can be removed.

To be clear, that doesn't mean removing everything, just stuff that is clutter.

[DJV]

"design is complete when there's nothing more that can be removed"

That reminds me of a story I was told back in the 1970s when I was a trainee TV engineer for Rediffusion.

When designing new TVs, they would build the prototypes with slightly longer legs on the components (usually the resistors and capacitors). Then, with the TV up and running, someone with insulated side cutters would come along and snip one of the legs of a component and, if the TV remained working, that component would be removed from the final design - if it stopped working, the TV was switched off, the leg resoldered together, the TV turned on and the process would continue with a different component. The TVs would then go into production with only the components fitted that enabled it to work.

Sometimes the removed component might have been doing something important in the long term - e.g. preventing a different part from overheating, compensating for the different tolerances in other components etc. Whether the story was true or not, I cannot say. But maybe it accounted for the booklet that was issued to all engineers. This listed all modifications that HAD to be made to various models of TV sets either out in customerland or if they happened to pass through the workshop and were found without the specified modifications. Most of these mods were to prevent known/regular component failures and burn-outs.

[just4this]

Re: "design is complete when there's nothing more that can be removed"

I have many times told the story of an uncle* repairing our TV set in the early 70’s.

When he was finished there were components he had removed and not replaced or replaced with added jumper wires..

His explanation was simply “I can’t see a reason it’s needed”

*same uncle I’ve mentioned in a post elsewhere on here who supplied the components for my first crystal radio kit. His teachings taught me a lot more than just how to solder.

Edit to add.

He once made to cover of Practical Electronics for the synthesiser he’d designed and built himself.

[DJV]

Re: "cover of Practical Electronics"

Ooh! Which one was his? I built several things from that magazine over the years, some of which even worked properly!

The largest project I attempted was Joanna piano from the May 1975 issue onwards - it did work for several years but took me a couple of years to hand-build the case, hand-draw and etch the PCBs and assemble everything! It was built like the proverbial brick shithouse but did suffer from a lot of sound breakthrough! I think it died sometime in the 1980s, after which it got replaced by something off the shelf.

[Eric 9001]

Re: "design is complete when there's nothing more that can be removed"

If those were components that did additional signal filtering and the TV wasn't far from a broadcast antenna, such components weren't necessarily needed.

I remember reading about some businessman who would walk up to finished TV circuit board design and then choose some big component to cut out (thus to shave dollars and cents extra profit) and if the TV still worked, he that would be the circuit board design.

There weren't many complaints about the lousy picture by those close to a broadcast antenna (those without a TV before wouldn't have much to compare to would they?) - but in more rural areas the TVs wouldn't produce a viewable image - but the businessman didn't care - it was up to them to ship it back at their expense.

[Steve Davies 3]

Re: "design is complete when there's nothing more that can be removed"

You have perfectly described the 'Clive Sinclair' approach to Product Design.

The early Sinclair Radios were infamous for having components still on the PCB but with one leg cut.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: "design is complete when there's nothing more that can be removed"

That's a name I haven't heard in a long time :).

I still have pictures of the Beatles rehearsing for their first ever TV appearance, taken by my late father in law..

[Taliesinawen]

Re: "design is complete when there's nothing more that can be removed"

> That reminds me of a story I was told back in the 1970s when I was a trainee TV engineer for Rediffusion.

An apocryphal story or possibly they were pulling your chain.

[werdsmith]

Re: "design is complete when there's nothing more that can be removed"

Dual Standard sets (that could work across 405 line VHF and 625 line UHF) during the changeover period did indeed have big chunks of unused circuitry once everything was being broadcast on UHF.

These things were stupidly complex and expensive especially on valve circuits and contributed to the demise of PYE and the domestic industry.

In my early days of working on hardware, I used to trial and error add various values to capacitors to smooth waveforms that were out of spec due to accumulation of component tolerances.

[Mishak]

Re: "design is complete when there's nothing more that can be removed"

I would say they didn't have a leg to stand on.

[LBJsPNS]

Re: "design is complete when there's nothing more that can be removed"

That was the story with DuMont and Muntz TVs. GE, RCA, Philco and others built quality sets designed to attempt good reception even in fringe areas. Dumont and Muntz concentrated on selling their sets in cities where signals were strong. And yes, they started with aknown working design and clipped components, like you said. Their sets were built to only receive properly in areas with strong signals.

[PRR]

Re: "design is complete when there's nothing more that can be removed"

> back in the 1970s when I was a trainee TV engineer

That story (there's truth behind it) has been call Muntzing, for Earl 'Mad Man' Muntz. Started in used cars but had picked-up electronics in back alleys and pool halls.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muntzing

Bob Pease https://www.electronicdesign.com/technologies/industrial/boards/article/21771148/whats-all-this-muntzing-stuff-anyhow

in TIME 1953 - https://time.com/archive/6609072/corporations-dig-that-crazy-man/

[DJV]

Re: "design is complete when there's nothing more that can be removed"

Thank you! I never knew that.

[Col_Panek]

Re: "design is complete when there's nothing more that can be removed"

You oughta read more Bob Pease.

[Andy The Hat]

Re: "design is complete when there's nothing more that can be removed"

Love to see what happened when they blew the arse out of the eht supply ... or started generating X-rays ... Have to say that in my experience with CRT design this approach would be a very bad idea.

We used to deliberately leave long legs on stressed components to allow a bit more cooling instead of using more expensive items. But clipping willy-nilly on high voltage equipment would be plain stupid..

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: "design is complete when there's nothing more that can be removed"

.. yet potentially highly entertaining for anyone watching.

:)

[Bebu sa Ware]

design is complete when there's nothing more that can be removed.

Antoine de Saint-Exupéry expressed this exact sentiment concerning aircraft in his Terre des Hommes.

"… la perfection soit atteinte non quand il n’y a plus rien à ajouter, mais quand il n’y a plus rien à retrancher."

And later he concluded perhaps with more relevance to the Windows f[l]ailings of Microsoft

"La perfection de l’invention confine ainsi à l’absence d’invention."

[Anonymous Coward]

You've hit the nail on the head. You only need to remove Microsoft products and thus free the hardware for more reliable code.

[Cav]

I'm confused by your comment. The items being added to the list could include removing things from Windows, thereby improving the design.

What clutter is on the list? There's clutter in Windows and removing that could be one of the items added to the list.

[blu3b3rry]

They're joking, right?

Or did ClippyPilot hallucinate the 8GB memory requirement for them?

Spare work laptop lives in my desk drawer. Fairly new machine and I'd imagine pretty standard for a workplace (11th gen i5, 8gb ram). This one is a stock Win 11 install with no addons, and no "extras" installed by workplace IT.

All updates applied. Running Outlook, Edge with one webpage open (El Reg homepage), and Teams we are showing 6.8GB RAM usage. Open more than two webpages, one document and start a teams call and the thing starts swapping heavily....makes you wonder how long the SSD would last with heavy use.

Needless to say there's so much bloat here it effectively makes what should be a perfectly decent laptop somewhat unusable unless you're disciplined about what software you have open at any given time.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: They're joking, right?

I regard 16GB as a bare minimum for a home PC, and for the average user who just leaves their office and photo software running in the background and 100 tabs open in their browser, you need 32GB for a day to day experience with no swapping to disk.

However, for me at work, 64GB is not enough. I do CAD and FEA... and to do serious FE models with proper software* with a reasonable amount of complexity you need at least 128GB, preferably more.

* i.e. Not the simple FE capabilities tacked on to a CAD package - be *very* careful about trusting the FE results from CAD software - the average CAD user doesn't actually understand the limits of their FE solver.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: They're joking, right?

"for me at work, 64GB is not enough."

I remember the days when the users had 16MB and the developers, who needed to run a particularly memory hungry development environment, 64MB

[Judge Mental]

Re: They're joking, right?

Think yourself lucky, when I was a lad I had 1MB and was told to think myself lucky.

(and, I had to sleep in middle of t'road and get up before I went to bed.)

[Will Godfrey]

Re: They're joking, right?

You had a megabyte?

We had to hand assemble the individual bits into bytes held together with sticky tape.

[Col_Panek]

Re: They're joking, right?

When I plugged in the chips to bring my Leading Edge D up to 640K, I was on top of the world.

[Mishak]

Places I've worked...

The developers would have machines with 1GB or RAM and the managers 4GB :-(

[keithpeter]

Re: They're joking, right?

Now take your stock laptop and add anti-virus and login scripts of various kinds (and TBF perhaps subtract some of the adware) and you have what I will soon have to help classes of new students long into. We all log in as soon as we get into the room, then do a 5 minute brief for the session on the wb while the PCs crank up.

[EvaQ]

Re: They're joking, right?

I've got a brandnew work laptop: i7-1185G7 with 32GB RAM. Must be expensive, but it works. Great.

However: in Teams, as soon as I start sharing a screen ... delays are about 5-10 seconds, even after pressing a key, certainly in the first minute after sharing the screen.

So, yes, I can think you can use Windows 11 with 8GB, even with a browser with a few tabs open, but as soon as you use Teams ... brrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr.

But: Microsoft's promise is about Windows 11, not about Teams ... ;-)

[David-M]

Re: They're joking, right?

On the occasions I've had to use Teams (on a 4Gb machine) I've run the web page version since it consumes far fewer resources... the app is a killer, but the web page worked.

[Fruit and Nutcase]

Re: They're joking, right?

Cos I’ve got a brand new combine harvester

I've got a brandnew work laptop: i7-1185G7 with 32GB RAM

[Sandtitz]

Re: They're joking, right?

"I've got a brandnew work laptop: i7-1185G7 with 32GB RAM. Must be expensive, but it works. Great."

Brand new? 1185G7 is six years and six generations old model already.

[Fading]

Re: They're joking, right?

Not a great CPU there - only 4 cores and 8 threads and not much better than the i7-7700k (a ten year old desktop chip).

[blu3b3rry]

Re: They're joking, right?

Surely a CPU like that should be total overkill for office tasks?

Sadly thanks to software bloat it's seen as "outdated".

[Piro]

Re: They're joking, right?

Windows 11 is such a turd, that it's absolutely the wrong place to start from if they want to improve resource use.

[Julz]

To

Be fair. I'd want my computer to use (almost) all of its its close to CPU memory, (almost) all of the time. Much faster than having to go a fetch something from far away storage.

In general, looking at how much memory is being used isn't much of an indicator as to how much memory is actually required as many memory blocks will just be hanging around in the often justified and hopefully optimised hope that their contents will be needed at a future time.

[Doctor Syntax]

Re: They're joking, right?

"Open more than two webpages, one document and start a teams call and the thing starts swapping heavily."

You mean you're wanting to do something with the programs you're running?

[blu3b3rry]

Re: They're joking, right?

Microsoft appear to be too busy finding new ways to slurp everyone's data via Windows or cloud services than actually let them run software to actually do stuff.

[Cliffwilliams44]

Re: They're joking, right?

Yes, but it's not always just Microsoft, especially in a corporate environment. Tag on your corporate XDR, Internet security agent, etc, etc!

[Doctor Syntax]

"Delivering a faster and more efficient out-of-box experience."

First you have to work out what customers mean by "efficient".

[ITMA]

For a faster and "efficient" out-of-box experience with a new Windows 11 laptop do the following....

Hold box containing new Windows 11 laptop out of a very high window. Whille holding it "mid air", open box. Let contents exit box "fast and efficiently" down to ground.

If said window is directly over a skip (dumpster for our friends across the pond) even better.

[blu3b3rry]

Surely a better fix is doing the following:

>Power on new laptop

>Enter BIOS

>Disable secure boot

>Boot live linux USB

>Install

>Enjoy!

Any modern (2018 onwards) laptop, even with weak specifications is pleasingly usable.

I'll admit it's not perfect, and it's definitely not a solution for every user and every task, but if you're just using it for web browsing and the odd document something like Mint seems to be perfectly adequate.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Surely a better fix is doing the following:

Then just use it as a door stop as none of your applications will run on it and it is not able to fully work with your scanner, printer and camera.

[theDeathOfRats]

Re: Surely a better fix is doing the following:

But it DOES work.

I mean, if you have something that ABSOLUTELY has to go through MS Windows... Well then, yes. The OS should be there to run the programs|drivers|applications|whatever. And then get out of the way until it's called again to do something.

You WORK and FIGHT with an OS when you're piloting a Helldesk. No one else should.

As blu3berry said: "it's definitely not a solution for every user and every task".

Though, for most home users? Hell yesss. They don't even notice the difference as long as you leave the same desktop background.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Surely a better fix is doing the following:

But it DOES work.

I call BS on that. Yep, I can do a basic scan with my scanner but I can't control the source, type or quality of the image. I can print on plain paper only but I can't control the paper type (photo, gloss, mat etc) or manage head alignment or head cleaning.

And no option what so ever to interface with my DSLR!

Yep, total BS.

It would be good if at sometime in the future linux was able to somehow integrate/interface/use the native drivers that were supplied by the hardware manufacturer.

[theDeathOfRats]

Re: Surely a better fix is doing the following:

Please allow me to repeat myself:

I mean, if you have something that ABSOLUTELY has to go through MS Windows... Well then, yes. The OS should be there to run the programs|drivers|applications|whatever.

What I'm saying is that it WILL NOT BE good enough for everybody, but it IS good enough for most.

[theDeathOfRats]

Re: Surely a better fix is doing the following:

And, sorry, I forgot about this:

It would be good if at sometime in the future linux was able to somehow integrate/interface/use the native drivers that were supplied by the hardware manufacturer.

Then maybe you should talk to the manufacturers. They are the ones providing the drivers, after all. And it's not like the GNU/Linux/FOSS world is trying to stop anyone from interacting with them.

[Dagg]

Re: Surely a better fix is doing the following:

Oy!!!! what have you got against rats!!!!

Rats make the most incredible sweet loving cuddly pets.

[Zack Mollusc]

Re: Surely a better fix is doing the following:

I can comment re printers. Often have to copy files from up-to-date win11 laptop onto thumbdrive and thence to linux machine on the same LAN to be printed out over the same LAN.

In microsoft's defence, the printer is from a very obscure manufacturer (Xerox) and is using a crazy protocol that has only been around since 1991 (Jetdirect).

Win11 doesn't even fail or complain about drivers it just ignores the existence of the printer. Except on the rare days when it sees it and works fine. Quality software.

[Bebu sa Ware]

"memory efficiency is yet to manifest."

Haul out the Ouija board and perhaps channel the ghosts of Windows past… or better… a proper OS.

A daft statement at best. An engineer would capture or profile running instances zeroing in on the larger memory using components and work on either improving those component's resource use or removing the component component although I suspect Windows is so spaghettified that it would defeat the best engineers (who in any case wouldn't be working for MS.)

[Anonymous Coward]

How about taking a look at the joke that is Windows Update? I have a 10 year old work laptop running Linux, it takes about 5 minutes to update and reboot, the laptop is perfectly usable whist applying updates. I have a modern work laptop running windows 11. It takes about 3 hours to update, it is unusable during this period. This is not unusual, I've had the same experience across multiple machines. I have to wonder how many man hours are wasted by our organisation as multiple staff endure this on a regular basis. Of course, our central IT department is run by a bunch of Microsoft fan boys. If Microsoft release a freshly laid turd with a Microsoft logo stamped on the side, I have absolutely no doubt our CTO would order one for every employee.

[Doctor Syntax]

"If Microsoft release a freshly laid turd with a Microsoft logo stamped on the side, I have absolutely no doubt our CTO would order one for every employee."

I thought you said you were already running W11.

[Ross 12]

So they're just going to add "and make it more memory efficient" to their AI build prompts?

[Pirate Peter]

premium win11

I am just waiting for a "premium" version of win 11 with no AI slop builtin, no doubt it would be a totally free to install, but has to be connected to the internet to use and fully subscription based so MicroSLOP could milk the User dry for every penny / cent that could

[Thernamarch]

Linux: electricity (optional)

hehe

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Linux: electricity (optional)

You have Linux running on an abacus?!

[tonique]

Re: Linux: electricity (optional)

If some people can run Linux on a potato, so why not an abacus...

[theDeathOfRats]

Re: Linux: electricity (optional)

I mean, you gotta move those beads REAL fast if you want it to work. And no GUI for you boyo. Who am I kidding, I'm pretty sure you could play DOOM there.

And now I'm guessing not if IT can be done, but if some other sick barsteward has already beat me to it (most probably).

[localgeek]

Same hardware, no comparison

I'm forced to support Windows in my everyday job, and have no illusions that the current memory shortage will lead to 2026 or 2027 heralding the year of Linux on the desktop (although I've seen hints of growing usage in recent surveys).

Not long ago, I bought a refurbished Dell Optiplex 3060 Micro PC (Intel Core i3-8100T, 16GB DDR4 RAM, 256GB NVMe SSD). Upon liberating it from Windows, I installed Linux Mint. Under Linux, that little machine is perfectly snappy. Because reasons, I temporarily installed Windows 11 Pro back on it, along with all the available firmware and driver updates. I also did the usual ShutUp10 cleanse to eliminate all the cruft. Even with those measures, the machine was significantly slower and laggy. There was a noticeable delay in just right-clicking the desktop, whereas Linux jumps to attention.

If Microsoft chose to do so, I have no doubt they could optimize Windows 11 to run more efficiently on modest hardware. But they would have to trim more fat to properly address the issues than I suspect they're willing to do.

[PCScreenOnly]

Re: Same hardware, no comparison

I'd try one of the Tiny editions. I use Shutup10 and a debloater but even then it is a monster

[trevorde]

Where did it all go wrong?

8 GB of RAM just to run an OS!?!?!

[Dan 55]

Re: Where did it all go wrong?

I mean, it's not that long ago that you could fit a GUI OS into 64K or 128K (if you were willing to stick with your 8-bit). Or into 512K (if you weren't). Or into 512K again (if you wanted the better OS).

If it had to be Microsoft then 1 MB. Or 4MB. Or 16MB. Or 32MB (but they really wanted you to have 128MB). I guess they hinted where they were going with Windows.

[Wisdom of ages]

Re: Where did it all go wrong?

No, lol to use software in the OS. Just an OS by itself doesn't do much.

[Anonymous Coward]

Cummulative Technical Debt

"Add little to little and there will be a big pile." --Ovid

[Eye Know]

Oh sure

8GB will run Windows, but what if you want to run an application. 16GB is the bare minimum for Windows 11 and Office 365.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Oh sure

My Corporate laptop, which should be a relatively "clean" image will be using 11-12GB RAM after i login, with NOTHING open. It's a total joke. Obviously some of that is start up activity and it does calm down. Right now with my usual workload of apps running i'm at 29.7GB used. 94%.

My Test PC, which currently has just Outlook, one Word doc and three Edge tabs open is using 12.2Gb of RAM right now....how can that be considered normal?

Developers have got so lazy with cheap and limitless resources, that memory and compute efficiency at the desktop is unheard of now. It's good to see it is being considered as an issue but that's only happening thanks to the insane price gouging caused by Microsoft and others sending billions of dollars around a magical AI money carousel......

[PCScreenOnly]

Re: Oh sure

yeah, but add

Corporate AV

Corporate Snooping

Corporate Patching

Office - auto run crap

Telemetry

Games and useless apps that have no business being on a business machine

[eldakka]

> "Delivering a faster and more efficient out-of-box experience."

So they are going to remove the Microsoft Account requirement*?

*yes yes, I know there are ways to avoid it, but that's not the sort of hoops a 'normie' should have to jump through

[Nifty]

I've got this little 4GB Windows 11 travel laptop, only because it was priced new like a pair of basic Apple AirPods. It's been interesting using it as a travel daily for home office tasks. Used Winhance to cut the features back and make it work logically like Windows 10. Then just yesterday I revisited Winhance and noticed checkboxes to remove Edge and AI features. Proceeded, it took it's time. Rebooted and it feels like I've released about 10% of RAM. It's floating at around 75% used now instead of 85% with a few Chrome tabs open. No ill effects from removing Edge and its services though I'm reading online it may be different for US editions of Windows 11 due to dependencies. I'm using a UK edition which may be like the EU one regarding Edge not being forced on you. The machine still needs rebooting after 6 hours or it slows right down.

[PCScreenOnly]

Macbook Core M

I got one of the above, which is a pain due to, well, Apple being apple. No variations of Linux work well - at least one thing with the keyboard, trackpad, audio or suspend make it not right,

I have gone down the W10 LTSC route with the debloaters.

Fine with VLC or films etc on the plane and can do my Onedrive to backup all the photos and videos from the cameras overnight,

Light as anything

[theDeathOfRats]

I got the cheap laptop (new) I'm using to write this for about €220. It's not a great laptop if you wanna play (recent) games. It's good for me, though. The processor is some silly Intel 4cores N100 or something, but it packs 16GB of RAM, a (upgradable) 512GB SSD (NVME? M.2? Dunno). I can do anything I need locally (mostly) and, when not, I use it to connect to my VMs. I know this is is not something a user would use. Nor should they. But this shit is more than enough for most home users.

And I haven't even talked about the touchscreen and 180º hinge that let's you use it as a tablet.

Now, the thing is, this came with a Win11 "preinstalled" (I've saved the disk image). The installation was PAINFUL. It took hours of "updates" and whatever. And then it finished. And it was eating about 4GB of RAM before I started cleaning the house. Which I wasn't gonna do, but I was curious. Just not so curious. And then I dd'd this other image just in case.

Then I tried Ubuntu (mainstream, probably better drivers) and... The screen ended upside down (this is a "convertible", or whatever they call'em, so, the camera is on the lower left corner when in "laptop" mode). I just found it funny, and would have probably corrected it should I have wanted to keep with Ubuntu. But, alas, I did not. So I installed Mint and... Everything was right? I was expecting a bit of a fight here but... No? YEAH! The clickpad is not behaving. Quite anticlimatic, just install "the other" driver.

So... About 15' of installing Ubuntu, having a laugh, switch to Mint (15', 25' with the clickpad solution) and I'm working.

Again, I'm NOT a normal user, but you ONLY need MSWindows WHEN you need MSWindows.

Sorry (not really) for all this shite. Guess I should go to the pub and bother those who deserve it :p

[theOtherJT]

Reminded me of a wonderful series of videos...

...from the Cathode Ray Dude about the insane attempts made by PC manufacturers about 20 years back to try and "quick start" their PCs by bundling whole other operating systems with them, and in some cases even resorting to some utterly insane "bury flash memory inside the motherboard" approaches. All this because Vista was so huge compared to XP and spinnys were so slow it took forever for the damn thing to start on the PCs of the day - and that went double with all the shovelware and other garbage manufacturers insisted in sticking on there that you had to scrape off before a new PC was even slightly usable.

20 years is about right for a generational cycle and everything old to be new again, right? I hear My Chemical Romance are back on tour...

[Andy The Hat]

Please, just once ...

use the phrase "We are reissuing Windows 7 with security patches."

Win10 is ok (ish) but ... no ... Windows 7+security. Machines will fly and I'll go back to paying for a license without MS telemetrying my life away.

[DLYONS]

hahahahaha ohhhhh your serious HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA

No, bloat and spyware running, AI code that is MASSIVLY inefficient. nah not if you want to run anything else.

[BPontius]

If you don't want to do anything

Running Windows 11 25H2, I have disabled unneeded services and startup programs, uninstalled features and apps including Edge, Bing and Copilot\AI I don't want, running an AV\security suite taking 171.1 MB and a sound driver/control program take 45 MB. Writing this comment with only the browser running (906 MB) Windows 11 takes up ~6 GB of RAM. Microsoft's own documentation requires Windows 11 have 1 GB of free RAM for operation, an equal minimum amount of drive space for paging. Even running only a browser is going to be slow.

Microsoft how do you run minimum 16 GB RAM Recall on an 8 GB RAM Copilot++ system? A 4GB system is even more ridiculous even without AI, you are talking out of both ends Microsoft!!!

[Roland6]

Re: If you don't want to do anything

>” Microsoft how do you run minimum 16 GB RAM Recall on an 8 GB RAM Copilot++ system?”

Well… given NVMe is supposed to be very fast, would not be surprised if the approach is to define a large virtual memory space aka swap/page file…

[theDeathOfRats]

Re: If you don't want to do anything

And eat that NVME in no time.

[BPontius]

Re: If you don't want to do anything

Be going through NVMes like the chewing gum flavoring!!

[Anonymous Coward]

Despite having 64GB of RAM, my work laptop runs Windows 11 painfully slow.

[Anonymous Coward]

Should be...

...but it ain't.

[Judge Mental]

Enough for Windows

and what else ?

[b1k3rdude]

Sure ok, the OS itself, but you wont be fcking running anything else at the same time for very long before the shit-arse memory management sucks-up what little ram you have left.

But the above aside, WHY... are they suddenly making this statement now.. not suspect at ALL.....

[Wisdom of ages]

Windows has always been my favorite OS because it works with everything I use without the flaws or failures of other OSs I tried. They just keep making it better all the time. I can't say anything about the AI features because I just have never used them or had a reason to.

[theDeathOfRats]

Windows has always been my favorite OS because

Because, as many others have said before, it WORKS FOR YOU.

If the software you need to run only runs in there? Well, there's not much of a chance for you.

And i'm not saying that as a bad thing. You need something to RUN something. You use what you have.

[Roland6]

Love the sarcasm…

Suggest you give the AI features a go, and discover the mental challenge of getting it do what you want and the joy when it finally delivers a result that works. For maximum benefit, suggest giving it a go when you have a fast approaching deadline…

[SuLegato]

Memory reduction...

How about the ability to disable WinUI 3 , for those that want to run Windows software and not tablet apps.

[Gavsky]

On three, everyone: "Well stop adding bloody AI to everything & not giving US, the users - full control over what we want to install!". Half the time, you don't even tell us - that's a curious approach to 'user choice'.

[Ensign Nemo]

“Keep going”

“The signal from you is clear: keep going”

What we actually said was “Fuck off, CoPilot. Keep fucking off. When you think you’ve fucked off as far as you can go, fuck off some more.”

[Bump in the night]

Glad I got excessive RAM while I could

32GB seemed like a good investment a year ago. I seem to be on the right side of change for a change.

[joed]

enough for ads on the lock screen

for regular use not even 16 is sufficient. Such a pig of OS

[Windows Is adware]

Re: enough for ads on the lock screen

I installed 64GB in mine.

However I run several VMs, all Linux. Media server, home server, workstation, messing around with version. Oh and a Windows VM. For when I have no choice in software.

[standard user experience]

Not a chance

So it will run the same as me after having 10 pints and a kebab?

[theDeathOfRats]

Re: Not a chance

Probably an improvement.

[Anonymous Coward]

We believe you, Sir ...

... and promise not to open Notepad once we login!

[DR_EVIL30564]

They already have a version for this

Windows 11 IoT LTSC.

only way to strip it any cleaner is to do something like tiny11

I acquired a grey market license key for it and I'm running it on my home computer. Granted all I really do on that PCV is pc gaming and the odd bit of 3d modeling and 3D printing, but it runs really smoothly for everything I do with it.

Granted my machine has 32GB of ram, but I've tested that version on limited resource older machines and it runs very well so long as you don't fire up 30 different browser tabs in chrome or other equally memory hogging processes.

I'm in the process of building out a new gaming PC for home (thankfully I had already bought the currently most expensive components back before prices shot through the roof), and I'm going to be running either Bazzite or CachyOS on it both seem to work very smoothly for my purpose. I just have to figure out which one I like better.

[Cliffwilliams44]

Copilot is a co-Pile!

Maybe people might be interested in buying an AI capable PC Copilot wasn't a complete CopileOfShit! Maybe it's that OpenAI is just sabotaging copilot so as not to undermine their own product but compared to ChatHPT and Claude, Copilot is horrible! It almost always gives the wrong answer to the simplest requests!

[the Jim bloke]

Mixed results from the Telemetry

But he did say the company has heard Windows users' frustrations and will act to assuage them.

"The signal from you is clear: keep going. We intend to,"

Definitely sounds like the telemetry is working really well.. what actions may result from it - probably wont be considered improvements by actual users.

[Windows Is adware]

Windows? More like Windoze.

If Microsoft are serious about this then they need to do a complete re-write.

Windows is bloatware and adware. They need to take every module, every routine, every bit of software and get rid of the crap and bloat. Make the code small and efficient. Back in the 1980s, PC world would publish a bit of code from a user (Z80 at the time) and over the next couple of issues people would write in showing other ways of getting the same result, which either trimmed bytes and or clock cycles off the code.

Mind you this was when maximum memory in a machine was 64kB and often it only had 8kB.

Microsoft need to lay off the features and concentrate on efficiency. How many people use all the features in word or excel? Or, for that matter, even windows?

[thejoelr]

It's a good start--reducing the bloat. If new hardware is going to continue to be so expensive, maybe they could drop the Windows 11 requirements for TPM. There are lots of computers that would run just fine and wouldn't need to be replaced. Maybe the software industry as a whole could take this opportunity to optimize for lower end hardware.

[JackHarveyCan]

An opportunity, wasted

You should’ve titled this article “M$ says 8GB of memory ought to be enough for anybody”, even though that’s a summarization of the sentiments expressed by Gates at the time, rather than a direct quote. You could’ve ignited quite the firestorm in the comments section, imagine the clicks and engagement you left behind? Of course to real quote is:

“When we set the upper limit of PC-DOS at 640K, we thought nobody would ever need that much memory.”

Or

“Well, in 1981, the shift to the 16 bit design gave us a megabyte of logical memory.

The 8086 has a 20 bit address - it's kind of interesting, it's really a sixteen bit data path, they have these things that they call segment registers, they are really index registers, but they shift them four bits to the left and add that to an offset to create a twenty bit address.

And so that's a one megabyte address space and in that original design I took the upper 384K and decided that a certain amount for the video memory and a certain amount for the rom and IO and that left 640K for general purpose memory.

And so that leads to today's situation where people talk about the 640K barrier. the limit to how much memory you can put to these machines.

I have to say that in 1981, making those decisions, I felt like I was providing enough freedom for 10 years. That is, a move from 64 K to 640 K felt like something that would last a great deal of time. Well, it didn't - it took about only 6 years before people started to see that as a real problem.“

[7Bit]

Runs like a...

Zorin runs like a champ on my old 8GB machines - just sayin'

Add Libre-office and Brave - who needs Microsoft?

[Blackjack]

8 GB of Ram is what my 14 year pld laptop has and it is more than enough....to run Linux Mint.