I recently went to a large electronics retailer here in Germany and was shocked to see that they’re still selling brand new Windows 11 Laptops with 4GB RAM. Idling at 85% RAM usage.
Not sure if they’re just getting rid of old stock but selling them with Windows 11 at all is kinda criminal.
e-waste straight from the factory.
16GB isn’t even enough if you need anything at all alongside your outlook, teams and browser
Fine for what? One web page in Firefox and the Calculator application?
I have 8gb on my work laptop and I’m at 90% on idle
Yea that should be plenty for all the telemetry, update checks, notification services, and AI slop tooling (Copilot) to run.
You should be fine as long as you don’t launch any applications, play any games, or attempt to use a web browser or the rest of the computer in any meaningful way.
We call this the “Jurassic Park Problem” at work. Just because you CAN doesn’t mean you SHOULD.
What do you need apps for when you can just ask the server based AI to do what you want
I have 64GB of RAM on my Windows machine and it’s barely enough.
Translation:
Microsoft admits AI-driven RAM shortage is eating into sales of machines with Windows 11.
8GB isn’t enough for 3 facebook tabs, regardless of how efficient the underlying OS is.
I’m glad we’re in a spot where we stop buying RAM. It means we stop giving them headroom.
Or you can stop using Facebook.
That’s just an example. Most websites are like this.
Yeah I know. Facebook is just extra terrible.
Every Windows 11 system I’ve used with 8GB of RAM ran like total shit.
Windows 11 with 16 also runs like hot garbage, so I’m not sure if it’s a ram issue. I’m sure more ram helps, but I don’t think it’s the main problem. I’ve not used 8 GB in a while though, so maybe some updates really changed things.
My work computer is an i9 with 64GB of RAM and it also runs like shit. It’s really noticeable how bad performance is since I switched to Linux full time on my personal systems and have a frequent comparison point.
Well, work machines have increasing counts of security agents. Mine has three and I’ve seen more. Plus Teams which uses enough RAM to run a proper OS all by itself.
True. We buy pretty good PCs and they run okay. But if I put vanilla Windows, even Win11, or any Linux, they’re absolutely screaming fast.
Exactly my experience. My Linux machines with 16GB of ram run circles around my work imposed W11 machine that has 64GB of ram.
experienced this first hand the other day… fresh boot and the damn thing is using like 11gb. luckily this was not my machine, and I’m on a Mac, but I felt the guys pain.
8GB is enough for Windows 11. Issues only arise if you open any applications while Windows is running.
It’s barely enough to RDP to another machine
Every Windows 11 system I’ve used
with 8GB of RAMran like total shit.FTFY
I bet if I tried Windows 11 with 128 GB, I would still think it runs like garbage.
Well how about 256gb?
It’s only 4 sticks of ram, how much can it cost? 5 mio dollars?
It is tradition
Theres online comparisons somewhere on ram/cpu etc… win 11 is VERY bad at 8gb in most cases. Linux at 8gb mostly fly. Hell mac os works well at 8.
Its just microslop doing their thing.
With 8GB you can boot Windows, the OS, no problem, but basically cannot run applications/games. You cannot use it, just stare at the screen doing nothing :)
8GB should be fine for Windows 11. However, the OS is so bloated that it simply isn’t.
Microsoft should fix that.
They can’t. The spaghetti code base is ancient. You can’t really take anything out at this point because it’s what keeps it alive.
Don’t worry, they’re using AI now so that’ll fix the spaghetti code. /s
The IT press was saying a decade or so ago the Microsoft had lost control of its code base and it would bloat and run like slug. Looks like nothing has changed. Too late to fix it with all the AI tokens in the world.
I watch a Rerez video where he looks at force feedback flightsticks. These sticks came out around the year 2000, and use ports that modern PCs just don’t have.
He tried plugging one made by microsoft into windows 11. This stick was made 26 years ago. It just worked. No setup. No drivers. Just, 26 year old stick.
The reason? They’re still including drivers from Windows ME into Windows 11.
This is one very niche example, but the 300kb or whatever a driver size is, is being preinstalled in all windows 11 instalations. And Windows 10, and Windows 8, Windows 7, and Windows Vista, and Windows XP.
I’m gonna guess you can count on one hand the number of people using this flight stick on Windows 11. It only works with a handful of games, because it only ever worked on a handful of games.
Why would this be included by default on Vista or later?
Imagine how many thousands of other files are like this. Taking up space, without a reason.
Taking up space, without a reason.
Compatibility is the reason.
That… doesn’t make sense. The Windows NT line changed the way hardware and drivers interacted with a new Hardware Abstraction Layer, so a WinME driver wouldn’t load in Win11.
Additionally, Win7 changed it so that drivers require certification and signature, which I could guess the certification would come in grandfathered, but the signature certainly wouldn’t be there for a WinME driver.
Why even complain about a 300kb driver sitting in System/SysWOW64, as it isn’t going to reside in RAM until the actual device is plugged in… so it’s actually a good thing to keep. I’m glad they don’t act as the arbiter of what is too old and force people to purchase new hardware when the old stuff still works.
Well except for that time when they declared Win11 to require a TPM. They dropped 16-bit support a long time ago too.
What I’m saying is, it shouldn’t take up space by default.
If YOU want to install it, great. You can spend 30 seconds installing the driver. Why force 99.99% of users to take on bloat, when they’ll never use it. Same thing with additional languages. If you speak other languages, great. You install them on your device. No reason I should have French installed on my device.
Now add the same idea with every bit of software. The OS itself should be bare minimum. Then you can add to your own installation.
Having the drivers installed is fine and, quite frankly, good; for exactly the reason you point out. When they aren’t being used they are only taking up disk space. And that is OK, nobody is particularly upset with Windows’ disk space.
It is the RAM usage, telemetry, and other running processes that just don’t need to be running. These are the things that make a Windows setup so bloated. One doesn’t need to reach out and tell MS every time you open the start menu, one doesn’t need Candy Crush and One Drive ads appearing in the OS. There is no good way to turn all that off. That is just using resources and making the OS worse for users.
It shouldn’t take a measurable amount of time to find the calculator when I start typing “cal” in the application menu. And yet it frequently takes upwards of 10 seconds for anything to show up at all.
Running Linux now with just under 3.5 GB used, running Firefox with 8 tabs, and the Steam Client open because I was gaming a few hours ago. This is on KDE Plasma Desktop, and nothing was ever optimized by myself for RAM efficiency.
This is just how it works out of the box.8 GB is NOT fine in Windows 11. I had to install Linux on my father’s laptop that has 8G GB so that it becomes useful. Technically speaking because Windows 11 is so bloated, 16 GB should remain the baseline.
if that’s what led your father to move to linux, I’d say that 8 gb in windows 11 is PERFECTLY fine.
My gf was complaining her laptop was slow, even though she bought it new last year and it wasn’t a cheapo. I went to take a look, 8gb win 11 laptop, hammering more than 7 gb of memory while doing literally nothing after being turned on. “Maybe there’s something wrong” I cleaned up her startup apps, uninstalled some stuff that she never used (and came as bloat from samsung), did some optimizations… Restarted, and still at 7+ gb of memory use. Yep, it’s fucked.
It’s doesn’t actually use those 7GB when idling though, it just allocates it so it’s directly available if it needs it. It will free up ram from its allocated amount if other processes require ram.
I have 16GB in my laptop, and it took 4 full desktop VMS running at once to finally make it struggle with opensuse KDE as the host.
My work computer sits at 8GB used with basic office things running and a tab or two open on a browser. I guess if you only have one browser tab open at a time you could do 8GB on 11.
My PC has 16gb of ram, but it won’t run Windows 11.
It won’t run Windows 11, because I refuse to install such a rubbish invasive AI laced OS.
I think a lot of PC users are spoiled, to be perfectly honest.
My work PC is an ancient micro Lenovo thing with a Skylake processor and 8GB of RAM, and it runs Windows 11 perfectly adequately. I generally need about 10 Firefox tabs open, as well as various other programs, and the only issue I find is that new Excel instances take a while to load - everything else feels perfectly reasonable. Don’t tell anybody at work, but it even managed to play World of Warcraft at low graphics at the same time.
Not that this is a defence of Microsoft.
I got 16 gb on my W11 laptop, and I’m regularly bouncing off the 13 gb point where swap/ compression/ whatever kicks in and shit gets slow, doing relatively benign shit like browsing the web, YouTube and Gmail open, and vscode running working on some python shit. On 8 gb I’d probably have to use my phone for everything except vscode to get it to fit. It’s not the lightest possible workload, but it shouldn’t be slamming swap so regularly.
Prefetch / Superfetch may represent a portion of that usage.
Absolute bullshit! That is not at all true, at least not until they bother to optimize their OS and software.
