All it took was a RAM apocalypse for Microsoft ro consider improving performance in Windows. I'm seeing brand new laptops on display being sold as Windows 11 PCs with 4GB of RAM.

Surface Pro owner asked if Microsoft would improve memory consumption, since they had to disable on-device AI services just to run a local model.

A cynic would say that customers disabling Copilot is finally what forced Microsoft's hand.

The effect is that OEMs are bringing 8GB laptops back, and hopefully, Windows 11 won’t choke on it.

8GB of RAM: the gift that keeps on giving. In 2005, you were basically running a supercomputer. By 2015, you were... still doing fine, honestly. Fast forward to 2025 and your machine is wheezing like it just climbed five flights of stairs while Chrome is open. But wait—2026 rolls around and suddenly 8GB is back to being acceptable again because everyone finally realized Electron apps were a mistake and went back to native development. Just kidding, we're all doomed. Your IDE alone needs 12GB now.

For the whole system, or just the spyware part?

Some devs in the big corpos got spoiled with so much memory, with feature creep they managed to bloat up once reliable programs.

In 1994 and when I began compsci, I remember how memory and bandwidth conservation was then taken so seriously, where performance was a high consideration over eyecandy (at the time, PCs were still 386s, 486s and some Pentiums coming out, and most I used had either 1mb or 4mb of memory available). That I once got hold of Creating Killer Websites (yeah, that book), which included a section on how to slim down images to make them download faster, as at the time nearly everyone were on dialup. Videogames were then equally small, they were mostly sprite-based and were easily fit into a CDROM, as other games had basic vector graphics and low-resolution texturing.

Great now remove the motherfucking tracking ID

Or maybe create GUIs without a webbrowser underneath again? Or are your students not capable of anything but web tech?

All part of the goal of turning personal computing into cable TV by making everything web app SASS.

i got my windows install down to 0 RAM by using Linux.

I recently had to configure an older Thinkpad X1 Carbon G8 for my little brother. It's only got 8GB of RAM unfortunately and he needs Windows.

So I installed Windows 11 IoT LTSC like I usually do, installed all necessary drivers and manually deactivated services that don't need to run. It still uses 3GB of RAM while idling.

My 2-year-old daily driver Manjaro install uses half of that, and that's on a system with 32GB RAM where Windows would almost certainly use more just because there's more

My Windows 2000 machine had 512MB of RAM. With it I could browse the web, run full-featured word processors, scan images, edit images, play 3D games, edit / compile / debug C and C++ programs, and so on.

If memory serves, my office machine about that time only had 128MB of RAM. It was slower, but it could do just about all of that stuff, too.

I'm not sure there are any broad categories of tasks I use computers for today that I wasn't already using my Windows 2000 machine for back in 2001 or so.

It's hard to fathom where all the RAM in modern systems goes. A million somethings is a lot. A million bytes is a huge amount of information. War And Peace is under four million characters.

„We bought all the RAM and will rent it back to you later.“ -„AI“ companies

Bullshit, Windows 11 uses more ram than any other OS I know of. It idles an entire gigabyte higher than Windows 10, it's still worse than MacOS although close, and it's nowhere close to Linux Gnome, Headless, or even KDE Plasma.

I'll believe it when I see it. I mean, Windows has a lot of auto-loading bloatware that Microsoft could cut, but I really doubt they'll actually have the balls to cut any of it.

As AI, cloud-native development, containers, and open-source ecosystems continue to converge on Linux

When the VP Windows Platform is telling things like that, it's time to let it die already...

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dude, windows uses paging even if it has a free bank of memory to use...i've seen it with my own eyes...it's a complete trash OS...swaps like nobody's business

https://www.techemails.com/p/bill-gates-tries-to-install-movie-maker

This was in my feed today. 23 years old. Nothing improved. But sure, windows will use less ram 😹

It will just hammer your ssd/hdd page file instead.

Haven’t we seen this movie from Microsoft before ?

Let’s put out some press releases and then do nothing. It will be old news soon and no one will notice