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/
266 points · 89 comments · view on lemmy.world
89 Comments
skooma_king@piefed.social · 147 pts · 55d
Every Windows 11 system I’ve used with 8GB of RAM ran like total shit.
MountingSuspicion@reddthat.com · 73 pts · 55d
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.
stealth_cookies@lemmy.ca · 44 pts · 55d
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.
CompactFlax@discuss.tchncs.de · 17 pts · 55d
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.
frongt@lemmy.zip · 4 pts · 55d
True. We buy pretty good PCs and they run okay. But if I put vanilla Windows, even Win11, or any Linux, they're absolutely screaming fast.
zod000@lemmy.dbzer0.com · 8 pts · 55d
Exactly my experience. My Linux machines with 16GB of ram run circles around my work imposed W11 machine that has 64GB of ram.
51dusty@lemmy.world · 2 pts · 55d
experienced this first hand the other day... fresh boot and the damn thing is using like 11gb. luckily this was not my machine, and I'm on a Mac, but I felt the guys pain.
flameleaf@lemmy.world · 15 pts · 55d
8GB is enough for Windows 11. Issues only arise if you open any applications while Windows is running.
village604@adultswim.fan · 3 pts · 55d
It's barely enough to RDP to another machine
IratePirate@feddit.org · 10 pts · 55d
FTFY
Buffalox@lemmy.world · 6 pts · 55d
I bet if I tried Windows 11 with 128 GB, I would still think it runs like garbage.
Lost_My_Mind@lemmy.world · 3 pts · 55d
Well how about 256gb?
SaharaMaleikuhm@feddit.org · 3 pts · 55d
It's only 4 sticks of ram, how much can it cost? 5 mio dollars?
mesamunefire@piefed.social · 3 pts · 55d
Theres online comparisons somewhere on ram/cpu etc... win 11 is VERY bad at 8gb in most cases. Linux at 8gb mostly fly. Hell mac os works well at 8.
Its just microslop doing their thing.
de_lancre@lemmy.world · 1 pts · 55d
Malyca@lemmy.zip · 2 pts · 55d
It is tradition
Magister@lemmy.world · 1 pts · 55d
With 8GB you can boot Windows, the OS, no problem, but basically cannot run applications/games. You cannot use it, just stare at the screen doing nothing :)
ButteredBread@sh.itjust.works · 1 pts · 50d
RamRabbit@lemmy.world · 70 pts · 55d
8GB should be fine for Windows 11. However, the OS is so bloated that it simply isn't.
Microsoft should fix that.
tomiant@piefed.social · 10 pts · 55d
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.
NekoKoneko@lemmy.world · 2 pts · 55d
Don't worry, they're using AI now so that'll fix the spaghetti code. /s
Greyghoster@aussie.zone · 5 pts · 55d
The IT press was saying a decade or so ago the Microsoft had lost control of its code base and it would bloat and run like slug. Looks like nothing has changed. Too late to fix it with all the AI tokens in the world.
de_lancre@lemmy.world · 2 pts · 55d
skisnow@lemmy.ca · 3 pts · 55d
Yeah we can't expect them to be able to hire the expertise required for this, it's not like they made over $1,000,000,000 net income last year or anything. Oh wait...
Greyghoster@aussie.zone · 2 pts · 55d
True. MS’s approach was not do anything for a long long time. Serves them right.
Lost_My_Mind@lemmy.world · 0 pts · 55d
I watch a Rerez video where he looks at force feedback flightsticks. These sticks came out around the year 2000, and use ports that modern PCs just don't have.
He tried plugging one made by microsoft into windows 11. This stick was made 26 years ago. It just worked. No setup. No drivers. Just, 26 year old stick.
The reason? They're still including drivers from Windows ME into Windows 11.
This is one very niche example, but the 300kb or whatever a driver size is, is being preinstalled in all windows 11 instalations. And Windows 10, and Windows 8, Windows 7, and Windows Vista, and Windows XP.
I'm gonna guess you can count on one hand the number of people using this flight stick on Windows 11. It only works with a handful of games, because it only ever worked on a handful of games.
Why would this be included by default on Vista or later?
Imagine how many thousands of other files are like this. Taking up space, without a reason.
deranger@sh.itjust.works · 16 pts · 55d
Compatibility is the reason.
RamRabbit@lemmy.world · 10 pts · 55d
Having the drivers installed is fine and, quite frankly, good; for exactly the reason you point out. When they aren't being used they are only taking up disk space. And that is OK, nobody is particularly upset with Windows' disk space.
It is the RAM usage, telemetry, and other running processes that just don't need to be running. These are the things that make a Windows setup so bloated. One doesn't need to reach out and tell MS every time you open the start menu, one doesn't need Candy Crush and One Drive ads appearing in the OS. There is no good way to turn all that off. That is just using resources and making the OS worse for users.
AbidanYre@lemmy.world · 2 pts · 55d
It shouldn't take a measurable amount of time to find the calculator when I start typing "cal" in the application menu. And yet it frequently takes upwards of 10 seconds for anything to show up at all.
Rai@lemmy.dbzer0.com · 3 pts · 54d
I love you LibreOffice but please stop opening your Excel program when I type “Cal” into the start menu hahaha
(I heavily recommend OpenShell on any Windows 10/11 machines. It makes everything look soooo much better, is hella customizable, removes the horrible garbage search that sucks ass and replaces it with good fast Windows 7 style search, and soooo much more. W10/11 start menu is unusable without it, it’s a mess.)
Peffse@lemmy.world · 8 pts · 55d
That... doesn't make sense. The Windows NT line changed the way hardware and drivers interacted with a new Hardware Abstraction Layer, so a WinME driver wouldn't load in Win11.
Additionally, Win7 changed it so that drivers require certification and signature, which I could guess the certification would come in grandfathered, but the signature certainly wouldn't be there for a WinME driver.
Why even complain about a 300kb driver sitting in System/SysWOW64, as it isn't going to reside in RAM until the actual device is plugged in... so it's actually a good thing to keep. I'm glad they don't act as the arbiter of what is too old and force people to purchase new hardware when the old stuff still works.
frongt@lemmy.zip · 1 pts · 55d
Well except for that time when they declared Win11 to require a TPM. They dropped 16-bit support a long time ago too.
Lost_My_Mind@lemmy.world · 0 pts · 55d
What I'm saying is, it shouldn't take up space by default.
If YOU want to install it, great. You can spend 30 seconds installing the driver. Why force 99.99% of users to take on bloat, when they'll never use it. Same thing with additional languages. If you speak other languages, great. You install them on your device. No reason I should have French installed on my device.
Now add the same idea with every bit of software. The OS itself should be bare minimum. Then you can add to your own installation.
pHr34kY@lemmy.world · 28 pts · 55d
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.
nosuchanon@lemmy.world · 6 pts · 55d
Or you can stop using Facebook.
pHr34kY@lemmy.world · 5 pts · 55d
That's just an example. Most websites are like this.
nosuchanon@lemmy.world · 2 pts · 55d
Yeah I know. Facebook is just extra terrible.
skisnow@lemmy.ca · 2 pts · 55d
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.
de_lancre@lemmy.world · 1 pts · 55d
nosuchanon@lemmy.world · 2 pts · 55d
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.
Kanda@reddthat.com · 1 pts · 55d
I did all this on XP with 512MB of RAM (ok it wasn't online versions of excel, but more or less)
de_lancre@lemmy.world · 1 pts · 55d
Kanda@reddthat.com · 1 pts · 54d
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
Rai@lemmy.dbzer0.com · 2 pts · 54d
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.
FireWire400@lemmy.world · 22 pts · 55d
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.
tiramichu@sh.itjust.works · 22 pts · 55d
e-waste straight from the factory.
Wispy2891@lemmy.world · 16 pts · 55d
Fine for what? My 8gb laptop was unusable on win11, swapping even at the empty desktop.
bitjunkie@lemmy.world · 3 pts · 54d
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)
mereo@piefed.ca · 16 pts · 55d
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.
morto@piefed.social · 8 pts · 55d
if that's what led your father to move to linux, I'd say that 8 gb in windows 11 is PERFECTLY fine.
alphabethunter@lemmy.world · 3 pts · 55d
My gf was complaining her laptop was slow, even though she bought it new last year and it wasn't a cheapo. I went to take a look, 8gb win 11 laptop, hammering more than 7 gb of memory while doing literally nothing after being turned on. "Maybe there's something wrong" I cleaned up her startup apps, uninstalled some stuff that she never used (and came as bloat from samsung), did some optimizations... Restarted, and still at 7+ gb of memory use. Yep, it's fucked.
ExcessShiv@lemmy.dbzer0.com · 3 pts · 55d
It's doesn't actually use those 7GB when idling though, it just allocates it so it's directly available if it needs it. It will free up ram from its allocated amount if other processes require ram.
cenzorrll@piefed.ca · 1 pts · 55d
I have 16GB in my laptop, and it took 4 full desktop VMS running at once to finally make it struggle with opensuse KDE as the host.
My work computer sits at 8GB used with basic office things running and a tab or two open on a browser. I guess if you only have one browser tab open at a time you could do 8GB on 11.
Lost_My_Mind@lemmy.world · 0 pts · 55d
My PC has 16gb of ram, but it won't run Windows 11.
It won't run Windows 11, because I refuse to install such a rubbish invasive AI laced OS.
skisnow@lemmy.ca · 14 pts · 55d
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?
vala@lemmy.dbzer0.com · 3 pts · 54d
Underrated comment.
A lot of it's the apps people run though too.
nosuchanon@lemmy.world · 1 pts · 55d
XP and 7 drivers were a nightmare. The rest worked just fine once it was setup.
avidamoeba@lemmy.ca · 14 pts · 55d
Translation:
Microsoft admits AI-driven RAM shortage is eating into sales of machines with Windows 11.
Buffalox@lemmy.world · 13 pts · 55d
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.
glibg@lemmy.ca · 12 pts · 55d
Fine for what? One web page in Firefox and the Calculator application?
flamekhan@lemmy.world · 11 pts · 55d
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.
MrScottyTay@sh.itjust.works · 1 pts · 55d
What do you need apps for when you can just ask the server based AI to do what you want
northernlights@lemmy.today · 9 pts · 55d
I have 8gb on my work laptop and I'm at 90% on idle
hexagonwin@lemmy.today · 8 pts · 55d
win2000 ran fine with 64MB of ram and it did everything perfectly. even faster than win11. lmao.
grandma@sh.itjust.works · 8 pts · 55d
16GB isn't even enough if you need anything at all alongside your outlook, teams and browser
swicano@programming.dev · 7 pts · 55d
I got 16 gb on my W11 laptop, and I'm regularly bouncing off the 13 gb point where swap/ compression/ whatever kicks in and shit gets slow, doing relatively benign shit like browsing the web, YouTube and Gmail open, and vscode running working on some python shit. On 8 gb I'd probably have to use my phone for everything except vscode to get it to fit. It's not the lightest possible workload, but it shouldn't be slamming swap so regularly.
Romkslrqusz@lemmy.zip · 1 pts · 55d
Prefetch / Superfetch may represent a portion of that usage.
AlecSadler@lemmy.dbzer0.com · 6 pts · 55d
I have 64GB of RAM on my Windows machine and it's barely enough.
de_lancre@lemmy.world · 1 pts · 55d
Mio@feddit.nu · 6 pts · 55d
I just hate that the web browser is setting the minimum requirements for memory for an OS today.
DigDoug@lemmy.world · 5 pts · 55d
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.
_haha_oh_wow_@sh.itjust.works · 4 pts · 55d
Absolute bullshit! That is not at all true, at least not until they bother to optimize their OS and software.
Mwa@thelemmy.club · 3 pts · 55d
They gave up after ram prices are too expensive.
tirateimas@lemmy.pt · 2 pts · 55d
If you want to get the most of your hardware, Windows 11 is not the way.
rikonium@discuss.tchncs.de · 2 pts · 54d
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.
Romkslrqusz@lemmy.zip · 2 pts · 55d
Really depends on what you’re trying to do. Done a few budget builds for folks who were attached to Windows but don’t multitask.
Someone who keeps their activities limited to one browser tab and one document/spreadsheet can get by just fine on 8GB.
Might seem very restrictive to most of us, especially here on Lemmy, but there are people who live their lives just like this.
Also, bit cheeky of Microsoft to do this right as they’re introducing new Surfaces with 8GB at what used to be the 16GB model’s price point, lol.
TheFeatureCreature@lemmy.ca · 1 pts · 55d
It could run on 8GB of RAM but that would require trimming out a lot of the shareholder-mandated bloat
Zephyr@sh.itjust.works · 1 pts · 55d
Switch to another OS and 256mb of ram is enough. If you really want like 32mb of ram is enough.
Pika@sh.itjust.works · 1 pts · 55d
"admits" seems to indicate that it's true. I would never run a windows 10 machine on 8 gigs of ram let alone windows 11. It may boot but you will struggle to do anything worthwhile on it.
Buffalox@lemmy.world · 1 pts · 55d
It's absolutely insane an OS has such re4quirements.
An OS is basically just a kernel with a shell on top for starting apps. Although the kernel of a modern OS is a technological marvel, it doesn't even require 1GB. The requirement should not be specified by the OS, but for what software is run on top of it.
On Linux you can Run a full fledged desktop, and a web browser and office pack on 2GB easy, and with 4GB even have breathing room, and even have 8 TTY's available just in case.
chunes@lemmy.world · 1 pts · 55d
I'm old enough to remember when everyone generally agreed that using fewer resources is a good thing.
Gerudo@lemmy.zip · 1 pts · 55d
This sounds like the same Vista requirements back in the day. Sure it "ran" on 512mb of RAM, but you sure as shit weren't doing anything else than looking at the desktop.
MadMadBunny@lemmy.ca · 0 pts · 55d
I remember clearly when Gates had stated that "640K ought to be enough for anybody."
Fooled me once.
poopkins@lemmy.world · 2 pts · 55d
Bill Gates never said that.
ExLisper@lemmy.curiana.net · 1 pts · 55d
Everyone knows he did.
poopkins@lemmy.world · 1 pts · 55d
citation needed
ExLisper@lemmy.curiana.net · 1 pts · 55d
“640K ought to be enough for anybody.”
poopkins@lemmy.world · 1 pts · 55d
Bill Gates never said that.
ExLisper@lemmy.curiana.net · 1 pts · 55d
Everyone knows he did.
poopkins@lemmy.world · 1 pts · 54d
citation needed
frongt@lemmy.zip · -1 pts · 55d
True. He said he thought nobody would even need 640k!
https://quoteinvestigator.com/2011/09/08/640k-enough/
poopkins@lemmy.world · 1 pts · 55d
Perhaps read the article you found. He thought 640k would be sufficient for 10 years, but in fact it was only enough for 6.
Dyskolos@lemmy.zip · 2 pts · 55d
...but we made it be enough. Tweaking the shit until it worked. I hated it.
Bluegrass_Addict@lemmy.ca · 0 pts · 55d
I can't even get the PC to not be using 95-100% ram on 16gb...
takes 10-15 minutes to be SOMEWHAT stable after a fresh boot.
it's a work pc so idgaf but there's NO WAY IN SHIT that 8gb will function.