Pavan Davuluri says the rising cost of memory is why Windows 11 will use less RAM, with work on the memory manager, WinUI 3 and WebView2.
As AI, cloud-native development, containers, and open-source ecosystems continue to converge on Linux
When the VP Windows Platform is telling things like that, it’s time to let it die already…
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Sure, I’m going to start running my containers using WSL. Who knows what kind of wonderful surprises are in store in the network layer? How the environment parameter passing will be somewhat more brittle with funky new ways to break because of new characters you have to escape? I can’t wait to troubleshoot all of that, and spend countless hours on MS forums and meet fellow colleagues with similar issues. What fun.
You forgot the bot reply on the ms forum closing the issue 4 years ago because “there was no interest” in the conversation. Closed = no need to fix surely.
My Windows 2000 machine had 512MB of RAM. With it I could browse the web, run full-featured word processors, scan images, edit images, play 3D games, edit / compile / debug C and C++ programs, and so on.
If memory serves, my office machine about that time only had 128MB of RAM. It was slower, but it could do just about all of that stuff, too.
I’m not sure there are any broad categories of tasks I use computers for today that I wasn’t already using my Windows 2000 machine for back in 2001 or so.
It’s hard to fathom where all the RAM in modern systems goes. A million somethings is a lot. A million bytes is a huge amount of information. War And Peace is under four million characters.
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Hibernation was useful when people shut down their machines (like, actually shut down, not sleep) and getting any process started was a slow ordeal. Nowadays you don’t really turn your computer off anyway. Windows doesn’t by default, at least. Newer laptops often don’t even support real sleep, you’re expected to keep them running 24/7.
„We bought all the RAM and will rent it back to you later.“ -„AI“ companies
All it took was a RAM apocalypse for Microsoft ro consider improving performance in Windows. I’m seeing brand new laptops on display being sold as Windows 11 PCs with 4GB of RAM.
4GB should be plenty for any general computing. I used to run Minecraft servers on under 1GB of system memory for an entire school classroom. It worked pretty well back then too.
My friend bought one of those, paired with I think 64gb of EMMC storage which is basically an SD card. It couldn’t browse the internet really with Edge in it’s default settings. I had to disable so much crap but I got it usable with Firefox.
It would probably run best with that really stripped down version of ChromeOS
Nah, with 4gb you can get away with most linux distros with XFCE, and you could even do some indie gaming. Plus, using ChromeOS means you’re expected to have a network connection at all times (which makes things like using office suites locally a pain).
I’ve ran Puppy Linux off a 8gb flash drive on a system w/ 2 gigs of ram. It was by no means good, but it worked good enough.
Depends on CPU, would love to have access to hardware like this to play with to see what it runs. But I don’t want to buy it without trying it first.
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It’s hard for the younger generation to understand, but 4 Gb of RAM is MORE than enough for 99% of tasks if your software isn’t written by lazy idiots.
Yeah, I wish current devs would understand that I didn’t buy a shitload of ram for them to waste it. I bought it so I could have a shitload of things running at the same time. I currently have like 6 applications running and I’m using 20gb of ram ffs.
And they wish you to understand that you should be prepared to pay more for better optimised software, but you’re not. If it takes significantly more time AND more experienced devs to build native applications versus webview based, the cost of building native might be as much as 5x more, but you can’t raise the price and you won’t get any additional sales, because people may complain, but nobody would pay extra for better performance.
Is there some option where I can pay for an optimized version of Firefox? I certainly haven’t seen it. What about windows itself?
Nobody minded keeping things tight before ram got cheap but it’s suddenly a problem now that it’s expensive again?
I still remember having a 4gb of ram on win7, and it’s enough for day to day tasks. The only thing that prompt me to upgrade to 8gb is games. It’s not too far ago MS recommend 16gb as a baseline for win11.
WinXP ran quite nicely on 4GB of RAM. You could boot to the desktop in under 5 seconds if you had a solid state drive.
All the day to day tasks someone needs to do with their computers haven’t materially changed in the last twenty years since XP held the crown. In that time the speed of processors, storage, gpus, and ram has increased by literal orders of magnitude.
And yet, somehow, things have become much shittier since then.
My xp laptop came with 512MB of ram. I’m pretty sure 256MB was typical.
For real, OP must have been rich. I ran Windows 7 on 1 GB well enough. It got slow eventually but I used it until 2016.
Because what used to be a native application that used 200 mb of RAM now needs to be a web application built on top of a browser using 4 gb of RAM to do the exact same task.
I will honest to God pick fucking Eclipse over VS Code every single day, because at least it runs natively.
I’ve been using Geany, was that a bad choice in hindsight?
The “enlightened” will tell you to use whatever you’re productive with…
…but the real answer is “anything that isn’t written in Electron and has no telemetry”.
What do you mean every app is not supposed to be a dressed up web browser?
When the Raspberry Pi 3 first came out I was shocked how much it could do with less than a gigabyte of RAM (it technically has one gig but it shares it with the GPU). Linux is ridiculously lean when packaged right.
I have an Android tablet with four gigabytes of RAM that sometimes crashes running Firefox with multiple tabs, something the Pi somehow managed with a fraction the resources. Windows often struggled with eight gigabytes before I upgraded.
Raspberry Pi 3 first came out
I put Retropie on mine, the pi3b I think w/wifi, only emu that had issues that I wanted to use was the N64, everything else was butter
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I’m right there with you. Not a single one of my daily use PCs is older than 2013.
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🤣 jfc
It’s not just the Windows OS that uses more RAM than others. Every bloody App these days left memory optimisation in the dust a long time ago.
The base OS itself is only a fraction of the issue
I think a lot of that depends on platform though. If you’re having electron apps like Discord active on your desktop the whole time, memory usage will be a constant issue for you.
I replaced a lot of my proprietary software with FOSS suites that run locally (with the exception of Steam and GOG launchers that I don’t have running in the background), and I haven’t had any issues with memory since.
Plus, using Ublock Origin on a Firefox fork tends to prevent junk from loading in the first place while browsing the web (and saves a shit ton of ram)
Depends on how much ram you have. 32 or more? Yeah the OS is a drop in the bucket. But even with 8Gb windows kinda chugs sometimes.
Some devs in the big corpos got spoiled with so much memory, with feature creep they managed to bloat up once reliable programs.
In 1994 and when I began compsci, I remember how memory and bandwidth conservation was then taken so seriously, where performance was a high consideration over eyecandy. That I once got hold of Creating Killer Websites (yeah, that book), which included a section on how to slim down images to make them download faster, as at the time nearly everyone were on dialup. Videogames were then equally small, they were mostly sprite-based and were easily fit into a CDROM, as other games had basic vector graphics and low-resolution texturing.
Yeah any time you hear devs saying “developer productivity “ you can associate the software they produce with higher ram usage, larger footprint, slower and doesn’t work unless your internet is fast.
It’s wild reading about the old game systems, like Atari, and all the tricks and techniques they used to cram data and code into small amounts of memory.
which included a section on how to slim down images to make them download faster, as at the time nearly everyone were on dialup
I’m looking at you, lemmy sidebar header images that don’t get scaled down after uploading and are often > 5 Mb.
dude, windows uses paging even if it has a free bank of memory to use…i’ve seen it with my own eyes…it’s a complete trash OS…swaps like nobody’s business
If you’ve eg. a system service that allocated a whole pile of memory on startup, but hasn’t read or wrote it since, then copying it to swap during idle disk time is a good thing. If it does get used, then it’s still in RAM, and if memory pressure increases, then you can reuse it immediately because it’s already on disk, don’t have to wait to swap it out. You could give this functionality a catchy name like ‘swappiness’ so you could fine-tune how aggressively it’s done by setting the value in a file, too.
Doesn’t stop Windows being a trash OS, of course, but if I’ve allocated swap then I want it to be used for best system performance.
Surface Pro owner asked if Microsoft would improve memory consumption, since they had to disable on-device AI services just to run a local model.
A cynic would say that customers disabling Copilot is finally what forced Microsoft’s hand.
Hang on, how many surface pro owners are trying to run a local model i.e. local LLM on 8GB ram? I’ve got 32gb ram and it struggles with most larger models
Smaller models, probably.
I disable every single new feature from all non Foss vendors. Theyre ALWAYS shit. 99% of the time its a shitty ui change for no reason and now shitty ai thats useless for no reason.
Whatever happened to good software. They all went to Foss lol
Publicly traded company shareholders, baby!
Any project worth its salt is privately held or FOSS lol
That’s why Valve/Steam holds the line. People think corporations can choose not to be evil; they legally can, but it’s practically impossible. That’s why we need strong government and regulation.
The effect is that OEMs are bringing 8GB laptops back, and hopefully, Windows 11 won’t choke on it.
8GB of RAM: the gift that keeps on giving. In 2005, you were basically running a supercomputer. By 2015, you were… still doing fine, honestly. Fast forward to 2025 and your machine is wheezing like it just climbed five flights of stairs while Chrome is open. But wait—2026 rolls around and suddenly 8GB is back to being acceptable again because everyone finally realized Electron apps were a mistake and went back to native development. Just kidding, we’re all doomed. Your IDE alone needs 12GB now.
https://www.techemails.com/p/bill-gates-tries-to-install-movie-maker
This was in my feed today. 23 years old. Nothing improved. But sure, windows will use less ram 😹
Haven’t we seen this movie from Microsoft before ?
Let’s put out some press releases and then do nothing. It will be old news soon and no one will notice
Bet. Some other group will just eat it up
You gotta wonder who’s spreading this constant meme about Windows 11. I suspect they have hard coded backdoors into linux
What a time to be alive.
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rising fuel prices push cooperations to make less hungry and more efficient vehicles.
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rising ram prices push cooperation to make less hungry and more efficient software
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but I can rent ram, storage and computing from your datacenters right?
and I can use that for my economic productivity and get the rest for my free time and entertainment?
thank you lords
You bet your ass we’re gonna start seeing a bunch of “pc as a service” products hitting the market soon. Thin client with good wifi antennas and everything is just video streamed from infrastructure owned by Amazon for you to use like a good surf.
