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.
Fine for what? My 8gb laptop was unusable on win11, swapping even at the empty desktop.
Fine for them selling you garbage. This pivot is clearly only to put a band-aid on sales until they figure something out about RAM prices. (or don’t and then blame somebody else)
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?
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.
Hell mac os works well at 8.
I’m certified apple hater and “all linux” user, but in all fairness - MacOS does amazing job with ram managing. Caching, swap control and i\o priority scheduling made way better than on any linux distro.
It is tradition
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 :)
Windows XP was initially only capable of addressing a maximum of 4GB of RAM in its first 4 years of release, and I can’t think of a single damn thing I want from Windows 11 that XP didn’t already give me. How bloated does this bullshit have to be for 8Gb to be the bare minimum?
Underrated comment.
A lot of it’s the apps people run though too.
XP and 7 drivers were a nightmare. The rest worked just fine once it was setup.
Fine for what? One web page in Firefox and the Calculator application?
win2000 ran fine with 64MB of ram and it did everything perfectly. even faster than win11. lmao.
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.
Any software can be fixed, it just that amount of effort needed for that would be insane in case of windows, so at this point it’s easier to use ostrich algorithm
Yeah we can’t expect them to be able to hire the expertise required for this, it’s not like they made over $1,000,000,000 net income last year or anything. Oh wait…
True. MS’s approach was not do anything for a long long time. Serves them right.
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.
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.
I love you LibreOffice but please stop opening your Excel program when I type “Cal” into the start menu hahaha
(I heavily recommend OpenShell on any Windows 10/11 machines. It makes everything look soooo much better, is hella customizable, removes the horrible garbage search that sucks ass and replaces it with good fast Windows 7 style search, and soooo much more. W10/11 start menu is unusable without it, it’s a mess.)
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.
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.
It’s crazy, 8GB on a Windows 10 machine works stellar for basic use, which is wild. I have a 13 year old laptop (admittedly high end when it came out, a pretty crazy model for under 1k USD… but it’s super old now!)
I slapped a (well, used to be) super cheap SSD in it and installed W10 and Pop!_OS. It performs similarity to my more modern machines that have 16 or 32GB of faster RAM when it comes to everyday stuff like web browsing, streaming HD video, and image editing. On Linux AND on Windows 10! Firefox and its forks have zero issue with 10, 20 tabs or more, including another browser window with 1080p video playing.
I can’t speak for the Facebooks and the TikToks and the chromes, since I don’t use any of those.
Caveat, OOSU10 and ClassicShell are on W10, and some other various small tweaks. But it runs totally fine and the laptop came with Windows 8!
I’ll never touch W11, it’s awful.
Or you can stop using Facebook.
That’s just an example. Most websites are like this.
Yeah I know. Facebook is just extra terrible.
My coworker was making a browser extension recently and noticed that most of Facebook’s frontend code is crazy bullshit designed to make it difficult for scrapers and bots to navigate the DOM.
The saddest part of it is that none of it is particularly effective, it just means they had to write 2 lines of code to grab the fields they wanted instead of 1, so all that’s happened is Meta have made everything worse for everyone and burned an extra kajillion client-side CPU cycles worldwide, for almost no benefit.
I had to bump my virtual machine (with win11) for work up to 32gb, simply cause single firefox browser + slack was running out of 24gb after full day of work. Which consists out of opening google office suit like gmail\gsheet and web apps with some internal tools. What a cool world we living in.
I did all this on XP with 512MB of RAM (ok it wasn’t online versions of excel, but more or less)
Yes, but your win XP doesn’t have ms-access integration with policy control and constant antivirus background checks, is it? Clearly inferior OS then. /s
The only reason I had to move in VM everything, that was perfectly working on my local machine with arch — security’s-team decision that all workers should have that ms plug in their ass. And surprise-surprise, guess where it doesn’t work oob? On top of that, they proposed solution if you don’t want to (can’t) connect it to your windows/macos machine — use azure remote desktop. Which also doesn’t work on linux despite using regular RDP — it specifically uses complicated token auth, that is not supported in any rdp linux software. Neat, eh? Honestly, if there were any better paying job (or any decent job at all) I would jump at first call.
It’s just incredible how what I used as a kid is like not even booting an OS anymore and what a system requires to idle would be considered NASA-levels of RAM back then. I mean sixteen GIGA bytes? You is joking.
Really seems like developers (yeah there’s execs and middle managers and the whole business that comes along with them) just let everything bloat to high heavens once hardware became more readily available
Webslop apps sucks. Less functionality and written with react.
Does it work for most stuff, yeah. But it still sucks. Google sheets is tolerable but annoying.
Do I need all the extra crap in excel? No, but it’s a mature program and doesn’t really need new features and constant tweaks.
16GB isn’t even enough if you need anything at all alongside your outlook, teams and browser
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 8gb on my work laptop and I’m at 90% on idle
Translation:
Microsoft admits AI-driven RAM shortage is eating into sales of machines with Windows 11.
I just hate that the web browser is setting the minimum requirements for memory for an OS today.
I have a Windows 11 IoT LTSC installed in a VM on my machine with 4 GB assigned. It just has to run iTunes, Firefox with nothing open and otherwise idle.
It was unusable/buggy as hell when I disabled swap so 4 GB + a couple gigs of swaps in my experience is the absolute bare minimum.
I have 64GB of RAM on my Windows machine and it’s barely enough.
Run linux on it with windows VM, if your memory hungry software supported. Unironically pretty good duo.
