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Microsoft pushed 16GB RAM as must-have for Windows 11 for years, now sells an 8GB Surface Laptop for $1,299
(www.windowslatest.com)
this post was submitted on 21 May 2026
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Using win 11 with 8gb of ram should be the sentence for nonviolent crimes
Cruel and unusual
There are laws against cruel and unusual punishment.
Sadly, not unusual enough
I have both Windows 11 and Linux mint on the same PC with 8 GB of RAM. I use it for making slides, research, watching videos, internet browsing and gaming (valorant, counter strike). Windows 11 isn't unusable at all with 8GB of RAM. It really depends on what your use case is, also depends on the amount of bloatware you have
booting the computer is the use case for the surface l.. lol, that's about all you're gonna do with 8gb
Is it really that unusable? I hate windows 11 as much as the next guy, but on the other hand, my parents both use windows 11 on an 8gb system and they haven't had any complaints. Granted they pretty much only do things in a webbrowser.
If you do anything heavier than just a browser, you're gonna have issues. I had a bunch of users on 8gb laptops one upon a time. If they tried to run excel, outlook, and chrome at the same time their systems would run like it was 2003.
I doubt that web browsing is good either with how modern web apps are built. But regular people might not even realize that something is wrong.
Yeah that doesn't surprise me, especially with how much ram windows 11 needs just to run without anything open. So far 8 gigs still seems to work fine for their usecase, and i didn't really notice any bottlenecks whenever i was troubleshooting on their machines either. If anything the cpu ended up being more of an issue, the oldest of the 2 had a ryzen 2200g in it, and i noticed it would often spike up to 100% in task manager without doing much. I had to upgrade it anyway since windows 11 required a newer cpu for secure boot, so i put a 3400g in it and now it runs smooth again, still with 8 gigs of ram.
I think they changed the frequency adjusting algorithm under the hood with 11. It seems to be much more sluggish on bumping core clock frequency up when a big task happens. I had to go in and lock the minimum frequency to 100% on a bunch of user laptops because they would stutter so badly any time they went from low to high CPU usage.
Sometimes I miss being a sysadmin, then I remember dealing with windows 11's eccentricities.