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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)
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.
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.
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.
win2000 ran fine with 64MB of ram and it did everything perfectly. even faster than win11. lmao.
Fine for what? One web page in Firefox and the Calculator application?
16GB isn't even enough if you need anything at all alongside your outlook, teams and browser
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.
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
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.
I just hate that the web browser is setting the minimum requirements for memory for an OS today.
I have 8gb on my work laptop and I'm at 90% on idle
Switch to another OS and 256mb of ram is enough. If you really want like 32mb of ram is enough.
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.
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.
Translation:
Microsoft admits AI-driven RAM shortage is eating into sales of machines with Windows 11.
They gave up after ram prices are too expensive.
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.
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.
