There’s something poetic about the World Cup taking place in North America while Microsoft keeps scoring own goals like this.
Microsoft updated its Surface buying guide to describe 8GB RAM as “great for everyday use like browsing, streaming, schoolwork, and productivity apps.” A companion FAQ adds that 16GB or more is what unlocks Copilot+ PC features. No acknowledgment that, for two years, Microsoft was the loudest voice telling everyone that 16GB was non-negotiable for a good Windows 11 experience.
What makes this infuriating is that Microsoft is one of the biggest reasons why the RAM situation got so bad in the first place.
↫ Abhijith M B at Windows Latest
This industry is a joke.
I’ve a corporate Windows 11 Pro 24H2 laptop with 16GB of RAM, just starting it up and having the corporate VPN, Outlook and Teams open eat 13GB of physical RAM, 18GB of system commit.
On Windows XP it would take something like 400MB, just saying. You cannot imagine what I could do with just 1GB of RAM with XP. It has always been the web browsers that ate the most RAM.
And don’t get me started with “Win 11 is better kernel and security, which explain why…”
4kb of RAM vs 32GB of RAM : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XnPYEWi2Oy0
It`s insane what could Windows 95 do with 16MB RAM. I had IM and Amoured Fist 2 at the same time.
I keep a collection of interesting screenshots and one of them is called “The desktop of someone with 256MB of RAM”.
There were more apps open and being useful than my laptop with 64GB of RAM and waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay faster storage.
Computers nowadays are fast, but they’re not actually *fast*
Much of this has to do with much improved security, as well as many more things to manage. Yes, a C64 can boot up almost instantly, but it’s not managing network cards, a plethora USB devices, reading and writing to an SSD, pushing millions of pixels to a screen, and trying to stop every program running on it from smushing all over the other programs running.
Yea, SSL and so on make a difference, but they don’t tell the whole story.
Follow Vermaden’s FreeBSD installation guide, for example. Yes, X11 with a 4K screen will use way more CPU than driving a 1080p screen. There’s font antialiasing.
But you have a full system, managing USB, audio device input changes, ZFS, reocurring backups, firewall, antivirus, bluetooth, and you will still have a system that has 20-30 total processes running and using less than 1GB of RAM.
Half of the stuff in Windows I have no idea what it is doing. It always starts running something when I am not doing anything, but it is not always antivirus, and these processes are heavy.
Take Excel. It has way more functionality than the old Excel for Windows 3.1 but it is 50.000x more resource demanding for 50x more functionality.
edit: perfect example
https://www.theregister.com/os-platforms/2026/06/30/former-microsoft-engineer-shrinks-notepad-down-to-size/5264319
Windows is a lot different than it was back in XP days (XP sucked, 2000 ruled 😉 ).
Ram is now always used for something. Windows uses it rather than leaving it free.
This is a good thing. Unused ram is wasted ram. Not “applications” like teams are indeed a problem. No it’s just a bad webpage wrapped up as an app and bad for it. I have fortunately opted out of new outlook again for now.
I tend to agree that unused ram is wasted ram, and that the OS should cache everything it can, because why be reading continually from disk when you have such a faster storage available doing nothing. However, I’m starting to doubt that in current systems this is what is happening. I think RAM is being wasted by developers using all the available resources all the time. Using a computer cannot feel super slow in 2026, for actions that seemed immediate 20 years ago.
ahahah 😀
a customer had a PC still with 8GB RAM. worked well for a long time, then the primary software got an update and the PC turned unusuable. constantly swapping.. too be fair, the situation before was on the edge, and this one update pushed it over it. but still, MS saying that its enough just makes everyone who believes it also living on the edge
Well, I’m no friend or defender of Windows, but for my job they require me to use it, and Windows 11 runs fine in a virtual machine with only 2GB of RAM allotted to it. It is a customized de-bloated installation though from the Tiny11 project.
Next year: 4GB, while it may seem low, is more than enough for efficient Windows operation.
2 years after, in the year of our lord AI: 640K ought to be enough for any human.
chriscox,
Funnily enough, we had a 4GB laptop that worked great up until a year ago or so (finally gave up, and we had to upgrade, but that was hardware getting old)
It is possible to have a usable system with less memory, but need to keep expectations in check.
I run Bazzite on a laptop with 7.5GB of RAM for the OS – with no disk based swap, and it’s fine. If Windows can’t run like that, stop using Windows. Simple problems have simple solutions.
This is what it happens when you create apps that are just lazy browser sandboxes: a mediocre ecosystem that depends upon resources that are no longer cheap. 8GB would have more than enough if we just had apps that are closer to machine language, not further. Yes, it’s true, professionals do need large amounts of RAM and storage but it is because of the nature of their jobs. But for the average person, users like me, we have to balance important life expenses and we are not able to break the bank just because a company gears towards 16 or 32GB of RAM just to power their sloppy caprice.
What amazes me is how MacOS, which is the closest thing to a comparable OS to Windows, actually DOES run well on 8GB of RAM. Like, an M1 Mac with 8GB is still usable in the sense that you don’t need to think about, or work around, the machine’s limitations. I’ve got one that I’m using both as my desktop/web-browsing/work machine and our home Plex server, and I can e.g. play games in Retroarch while a couple videos are transcoding/streaming in the background, and there’s not even so much as a stutter.
I’ve got a 10-year-old Toshiba Chromebook (Swanky) that runs KDE Neon well despite only having 4GB or RAM, which is nifty in the sense that it runs well, but since it only has like 16 GB flash storage that’s all just a support system for a web browser. And you can play Doom.
Yes, I bought a Neo with 8GB of ram, And I was concerned to begin with but soon realised it all runs perfectly fine in that space, So when I bought an Air later on I selected 24GB instead of the normal 32 I would have in a Windows machine and honestly I could have got away with 16 in the mac.
I wouldn’t want to use Windows on 8GB, My work machine struggles with 32.
My org has several users that experience issues with 8GB on macOS, but only on Intel macs. Granted, we don’t have many users on M1 based macs with only 8GB, so it could just be a small sample size. That said, we’re rolling out 700+ Neos, so we’ll see. We’re not happy about going with the Neos over Airs (which have 16GB in the base models).
My co-worked did set a calendar event for an “I told you so” party two years from now, though.
For Windows 11 this is a joke. The system is already quite inefficient by itself and most of those machines will have iGPUs so you’ll get less than 7 GiB available even before loading Windows. Spin up a browser, mail client and office-adjacent application and there’ll be almost no free memory. And this is assuming a 1080P screen, with higher resolutions come much higher memory usage because of the larger surfaces needed for every window and the desktop.