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Fine for what? My 8gb laptop was unusable on win11, swapping even at the empty desktop.
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?
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.
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 just hate that the web browser is setting the minimum requirements for memory for an OS today.
16GB isn't even enough if you need anything at all alongside your outlook, teams and browser
Fine for what? One web page in Firefox and the Calculator application?
They gave up after ram prices are too expensive.
I have 8gb on my work laptop and I'm at 90% on idle
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 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.
Translation:
Microsoft admits AI-driven RAM shortage is eating into sales of machines with Windows 11.
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.
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.
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.
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
Every Windows 11 system I’ve used ~~with 8GB of RAM~~ ran like total shit.
FTFY
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.
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.
I think a lot of PC users are spoiled, to be perfectly honest.
My work PC is an ancient micro Lenovo thing with a Skylake processor and 8GB of RAM, and it runs Windows 11 perfectly adequately. I generally need about 10 Firefox tabs open, as well as various other programs, and the only issue I find is that new Excel instances take a while to load - everything else feels perfectly reasonable. Don't tell anybody at work, but it even managed to play World of Warcraft at low graphics at the same time.
Not that this is a defence of Microsoft.
