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Preloading File Explorer in Windows 11 Doubles RAM Usage, Offers Minimal Speed Boost
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this post was submitted on 02 Dec 2025
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It's not a windows is shit at managing memory problem though. If you have 1MB of RAM left and you open something, something has to happen. A process killed, an alert generated, something moved to disk instead of RAM (paging), or a system lockup or something. This is the management piece. What to do when you're out.
That is entirely a shit at managing memory problem.
If you have 1 MB of RAM left, firstly, your OS has not properly managed it's resources. It should have reserved system RAM. Secondly, a good memory manager will have swapped out unused, or low priority pages.
And that's not just a system issue. A well developed piece of software will unload (or never load) parts of the software that are not needed at runtime.
I'm going to give you a great example I just read about today, about bad programming practices. The install of Helldivers 2 has been reduced from 154GB to 23 GB. That's a reduction of 85%. This was driven by de-duplication of code. So, while this is a storay about storage space, ask how many modules and functions were duplicated, and how many of those were loaded independently into RAM.
Bad programming in one area, means bad programming in all areas.
With your 1 MB example, I would ask if all of the devs who created all of the other programs on the system had written better and more efficient code, would you still need more RAM? The answer is no.