Microsoft admits 8GB RAM is fine for Windows 11, after years of pushing 16GB as the baseline
https://www.windowslatest.com/2026/06/25/microsoft-now-says-8gb-ram-is-fine-for-everyday-use-right-after-years-of-pushing-you-to-buy-more/
182 points · 56 comments · view on lemmy.world
56 Comments
DokPsy@lemmy.world · 95 pts · 73d
As someone who deals with various windows bullshit on the daily, 8gb for win11 is fine assuming you don't use any applications. If you want to actually use the machine, 16gb is the absolute minimum
JordanZ@lemmy.world · 32 pts · 73d
DokPsy@lemmy.world · 13 pts · 73d
Honestly some of my biggest fights are with browsers being ram hogs and edgewebview2 constantly shitting the bed causing excessive ram utilisation and various crashes to basic office applications
SaraTonin@lemmy.world · 1 pts · 72d
I had to uninstall chrome and switch to edge on my work laptop just to make it usable. 8 is barely enough, if you’re very careful
adarza@piefed.ca · 29 pts · 73d
next they'll say any ol' hdd is fine, too.
(they are not)
if you ever have to use win11 on a laptop with 4 or 8gb ram and a 2.5in hdd, you'll be inventing new swear words.
Flatfire@lemmy.ca · 7 pts · 73d
About halfway through the lifecycle for Windows 10, HDD performance became pure garbage and I genuinely do not know how/why they did that. Something about how they were handling indexing or read operations at idle meant pinning the disk at 100% usage almost all the time and the only solve was an SSD. I hate that shit so much.
spicehoarder@lemmy.zip · 3 pts · 73d
I hope they have to rebase their os to win 7 due to ram prices
Cort@lemmy.world · 1 pts · 72d
I mean, as long as you pair it with an optane cache drive it should be fine
adarza@piefed.ca · 2 pts · 72d
optane was a horrible and ineffective 'solution' to windows and application bloat.
Cort@lemmy.world · 1 pts · 72d
I think the product was good. But it was too little too late, since nand SSD pricing had already begun to drop. If it had a higher capacity, or lower pricing, or was released sooner it would have been a hit.
I still use one for an os drive in my nas.
adarza@piefed.ca · 1 pts · 72d
the one i still have just an ssd boot for a dietpi (debian mini server), separated from its hdd which is just file storage. as a regular ssd, the modules are 'ok'. a bit slow--and of course very small, but higher endurance. i should never have to worry about it running out of writes in that little mini-server.
Korhaka@sopuli.xyz · 18 pts · 73d
Why the fuck does the OS need so much memory?
derpgon@programming.dev · 18 pts · 73d
Mine doesn't, maybe you are using the wrong one?
This was supposed to be a shamless Linux plug, but in order to be useful for some people I'd recommend debloating your Windows installation. I've had good experience with Raphire's debloater.
Korhaka@sopuli.xyz · 4 pts · 73d
I use Linux at home too, but windows at work
mnemonicmonkeys@sh.itjust.works · 17 pts · 72d
Spyware
daniskarma@lemmy.dbzer0.com · 6 pts · 73d
M after ricing arch into some ungodly aberration that was never meant to exist in this world.
olafurp@lemmy.world · 3 pts · 71d
Everything always gets bolted on with no consideration for memory footprint. It's basically 2 decades of software inside the memory because if they delete something it breaks.
khanh@lemmy.zip · 15 pts · 73d
"fine" depends on what you're doing. web browsing? youtube? maybe, just dont open more than 5 tabs. doing literally anything else? no. get 12 gb or 16 gb ram.
sanitation@lemmy.today · 5 pts · 73d
My rule was 32gb at least. And that was for. At least 10 years
VitoRobles@lemmy.today · 3 pts · 72d
I have 16gb and more than 15 tabs causes my computer to studder.
Spacehooks@reddthat.com · 14 pts · 73d
1000% bs. My work pc has 8gb of ram and im always 100%. I hardly get anything done quickly if I open teams which I have to.
MangoPenguin@lemmy.blahaj.zone · 14 pts · 73d
I guess maybe 8GB is fine if all you do is have a browser open with some tabs.. W11 is not RAM friendly.
lazynooblet@lazysoci.al · 11 pts · 73d
I'd say 8G is fine until you open a browser.
FishFace@piefed.social · 8 pts · 73d
and every application today is a browser.
calcopiritus@lemmy.world · 11 pts · 72d
Yeah no. I'm at 32 and task manager says that 28+GiB are being used on idle. The sum of everything that appears on task manager doesn't reach 2GiB.
And it's not "the OS is using it because you aren't", because if I do anything demanding, the OS won't give me back that RAM, it'll use the swap instead.
filcuk@feddit.uk · 3 pts · 72d
That is not how this works. The system isn't using all that, I can guarantee that. Even launching a terminal (or any app) as hidden will not make it and its usage appear in taskmgr - I once unknowingly managed to exhaust my 64GB by launching hundreds of terminal sessions withoutever killing them. Try something like sysinternals process manager to see what's actually going on.
calcopiritus@lemmy.world · 3 pts · 72d
You can guarantee it? Are you a Microsoft Windows developer? In that case, I'd like to fill in a bug report.
When I turn my machine on, without me doing anything at all, task manager would display >20GiB used. I don't have many applications to run at startup. At most iCUE (Corsair keyboard drivers). I don't think iCUE is using 20GiB if RAM.
Then, I open 2-3 vscode instances. Each instance launches its own rust-analyzer, since I'm looking at 3 rust projects simultaneously.
Each rust-analyzer instance uses ~3GiB of RAM.
That is enough to reach 100% ram usage and the computer becomes noticeably slower, even if CPU usage is at 7%.
Tell me, Microsoft Windows developer. Why does my machine grind to a halt when I use ~10GiB of RAM, if win11 says that the recommended amount is 16GiB and I have 32? 10+16 = 26. I should have a minimum of 6GiB left. The math ain't mathing.
filcuk@feddit.uk · 2 pts · 72d
I would advise against doing your own math
calcopiritus@lemmy.world · 1 pts · 72d
Not only are you a Microsoft developer. Are you also a maths PhD? I thought I was using maths of a level I'm comfortable with. Mainly addition, abstraction, and multiplication if real numbers.
Perhaps I've committed a grave mistake. Please show me where my mistake is.
filcuk@feddit.uk · 1 pts · 72d
You are funny, but no, it's just unnecessary.
Using appropriate tools, such as the aforementioned process explorer, will help you avoid any guesswork.
TheFarm@lemmy.world · 1 pts · 71d
Have you tried using the windows debloat tool to get rid of all the AI and garbage that Win11 comes pre-installed with? Might help with the excessive RAM usage on startup.
Tiral@lemmy.world · 2 pts · 72d
You have other problems beyond windows. My laptop has 32gb and it uses like 6.5gb with nothing open on the desktop.
spicehoarder@lemmy.zip · 1 pts · 71d
Thats still a lot lmao
calcopiritus@lemmy.world · 1 pts · 72d
It not happening to everyone doesn't mean that it's not an issue.
Years back there was an issue with a windows update that eliminated the "Documents" folder on some people. I updated my computer and the folder was still there. It didn't happen to me, but it did happen.
There are millions of possible computer configurations. Some issues may happen in some computers but won't happen in others.
Even if 2 people have the same computer, they might have followed a different path to reach the current version of windows. Some might've started at win 10 and upgraded from there, others might've installed the latest version of win11.
All those things might result in bugs happening in some devices but not on others.
Dpek@lemmy.zip · 1 pts · 64d
That was nonsense int he first place anyways
Windows doesnt include cache in the used ram procentage
ThomasWilliams@lemmy.world · 11 pts · 73d
...to 4 GB...
Flatfire@lemmy.ca · 5 pts · 73d
I've used Windows 10 with 4GB. It's not a comfortable experience. Neither is Windows 11 with 8GB.
DarkFuture@lemmy.world · 9 pts · 72d
I mean maybe, if you aren't running any other softare at all and just staring at your desktop.
cecilkorik@piefed.ca · 8 pts · 73d
Don't worry, soon they will announce that 4GB will probably be fine too, once they discover they need even more RAM for their AI slop farms.
ThomasWilliams@lemmy.world · 1 pts · 73d
Windows 11 has a minimum requirement of 4 GB.
Lumidaub@feddit.org · 5 pts · 73d
Why would they knowingly push for better but unnecessary hardware? What do they gain from people buying more RAM than necessary to run Windows?
Edit: wait, they also sell laptops. Duh.
Kids, learn from my mistakes, read article first, comment second.
adarza@piefed.ca · 4 pts · 73d
they also provide the os on most systems sold by everyone else, too.
artyom@piefed.social · 2 pts · 73d
Nothing. It's not unnecessary. It's very necessary, especially Windows. They're just shifting their perspective because RAM has gotten so wildly expensive.
Stormcrow@lemmy.dbzer0.com · 4 pts · 72d
But you'll definitely want OneDrive, Teams, Edge, Chrome, Adobe and your totally necessary "anti-virus" to run in the background 24/7 right?
LovableSidekick@lemmy.world · 3 pts · 72d
Okay but with 16 gig you have so much room for Activities!
kreskin@lemmy.world · 2 pts · 72d
Microsoft leadership is a bunch of scumbags.
Madrigal@lemmy.world · 2 pts · 73d
I thought 32GB was a minimum for the last PC I built 8 years ago.
altphoto@lemmy.today · 1 pts · 73d
How about 2?
some_guy@lemmy.sdf.org · -1 pts · 73d
Maybe it is. I don't know. But I've read a lot of comments suggesting that Windows burns RAM harder than MacOS and Linux.
I'm so glad my work is buying laptops with 32GB of RAM. Finally, we're in the future. (I think true nerds need more, but these are office people using Word and Outlook. It's glorious.)
OhmeHose@feddit.org · 2 pts · 73d
Linux? Depending on the distro, ram usage is a joke. Got a rpi and a NUC running Debian as a server (so without running the display environment constantly) and the use ~ 500-800mb ram. With a DE, they need like 1-1.2gigs.
The nuc is particularly funny since it hosts 2 Nextcloud instances, 2 websites and a qwen3 embedding model and sits at ~ 6gb ram.
mnemonicmonkeys@sh.itjust.works · 1 pts · 72d
Wait, is this a Debian-exclusive feature?
Guess I need to take a second stab at setting up my own server
aloofPenguin@piefed.world · 3 pts · 72d
it's not an exclusive feature, as you can you can do this on most if not all distros. it's just that Debian is better suited to server (this is a bit objective) since the packages are less likely to change and break on you (so reliability and stability)
OhmeHose@feddit.org · 2 pts · 72d
Yes you can disable the DE on Debian and probably on other distros too.
I "disable" it the wrong way, since I want to have it after a reboot, for diagnostics, I just shut it off via systemctl For gnome it should be: Systemctl stop gdm3
But you can also configure it to always start headless. And if you need it you can launch it again from the shell.
FishFace@piefed.social · 0 pts · 73d
This is irrelevant for work, where you need a web browser and work applications (which are probably more web browsers). My work laptop is currently sitting on 33G used out of 64G.
OhmeHose@feddit.org · 3 pts · 73d
Yeah and if you'd use Linux your work laptop would be sitting at like 6gb, if you'd just browse the web and edit text documents.
The only time I ever need more than 10 gigs on my main machine is when I play games. Windows and Linux aren't even close in normal use cases.
You can even try it yourself, grab yourself a 10 year old laptop and install any Linux distro on it, it will feel like a new machine.
FishFace@piefed.social · 0 pts · 73d
which I do so maybe remove your head from wherever it's stuck and rethink.
Memory use of applications is not especially different between operating systems (assuming no compression). The hand the OS has in memory usage is mainly its own memory usage, but that is dwarfed by application usage. In the case of an application like, say, Firefox, its core is written in languages like C++ with explicit memory management. The same code runs on both platforms, so when you open a webpage, the same data structures are needed in the same quantities. CPU architecture can change how much memory a structure needs, but OS doesn't. So the application requests essentially the same number of bytes from the operating system, and the OS reserves that many bytes for the use of the application.
You can get into more detail than this, resulting in some small differences, but given that you started with a hilariously wrong assumption I don't think there's any need.
OhmeHose@feddit.org · 4 pts · 72d
Ok Mr grumpy