Even Microsoft couldn't make Windows 11 work well on 8GB of RAM | Hacker News Reader

Even Microsoft couldn't make Windows 11 work well on 8GB of RAM

theverge.com

47 pointsGeekyBear28 comments

I remember that EMACS meant Eight Megabytes And Constantly Swapping, a reference to the Emacs editor requiring a system with 8 MB of memory and then still swapping. It was considered an exaggeration. Even Windows 95 could run OK-ish on a system with 4 MB of memory, with 8 MB being plenty. We have gained some things in the meantime, and lost some too.

My main desktop PC has 4GB of RAM running Windows 7 with all the crap disabled. The OS uses a few hundred MB, with everything else free for software development or whatever I'm doing with it.

I don't think I could get Windows 11 to even boot in 4GB even though it does about the same as Windows 7 did.

> even though it does about the same as Windows 7 did.

That is your opinion. Did you check the number of svchost.exe instances on the two OSs ? Did you check the number of system processes.

Win 11 has telemetry, to improve it. It really cares about your security, although the bad guys are still able to install ransomware. And, the most important, Windows 11 has rounded corners and 3D acceleration for the 2D windowing system.

See ? A lot of improvements. Now of course, you have 2 (gray) colour choices: light or dark. But this is because of astonishing advances in Computer Science.

And, last but not least, a quote from John Malkovitch: see youtube Space Force.

Yeah, I did forget that it has the visually stunning flat UI that everyone kept begging Microsoft to add. So maybe the multi-gigabyte memory size increase was worth it after all.

EMACS was indeed big and fat back in the day but hasn't grown much and is downright svelte by today's standards. Currently its using ~80MB on my system, compared to 7GB for firefox, 1GB for signal desktop (a chat app! yes I know its electron) and ~840 MB for gnome shell.

It's bizarre to see 8GB spoken of as barely sufficient for basic uses. I remember when the baseline was measured in megabytes.

I remember having a computer and reading about how the CPU (486) could address up to 4 GB of memory. I thought that was maybe a mistake, since even my hard drive was maybe 100 MB, and I had 16 MB of memory IIRC.

I figured maybe they meant hard drive space (which I could kind of imagine being that large).

"640kBs should be enough for anyone"? I have 64kB and half of it is ROM and VRAM.

I agree that It is silly that an OS that is still basically NT 3.1 needs 8GB to run.

In early XP days, it was 32MB for the OS and 2GB for Firefox.

I suppose the answer to the riddle is that now every program included in Windows is an Electron abomination with its own "Firefox".

Soon, every "Firefox" will include its own slightly different LLM.

NOTEPAD.EXE will run at 2FPS on your 256GB AI box.

"basically NT 3.1" is an incredible over exaggeration. Total RAM capacity has stagnated over the years and subsequent generations of DDR have backed speed instead.

8GB in a computer was considered good in a consumer performance machine in 2010. 16 years before that was 6-8MB.

What seems like an over–exaggeration to you?

I agree that the time periods you mention saw different growth patterns and I would blame the stagnant software for the situation —it has slowly grown into the hardware with no real feature improvement.

Even the current path to exponential RAM increases is a naked king —1T models are only slightly better than 1B models at following instructions.

What to expect when the culture is to deliver Electron crap as "native" apps?

The other day I heard on a podcast a guy complaining how hard it was to do backend software in terms of performance, his tooling? Node.js.

Naturally when even Microsoft gets these folks as coders that is what we get, Webview2 all over the place on basic OS, C or C++ code that barely works.

One of the upsides of AI is that now all we need to do is prompt our way to native versions of these apps...

One would imagine, instead the Claude company ships TUI React Native apps.

8 GB was getting common like 16 years ago...

The baseline in the past was that your program ran on bare metal or in the windowing system being written in assembly or C/Pascal. Nowadays your program runs in the browser which runs in the Windowing system, your program being written in 20 levels deep JS abstractions.

They call this progress.

With a byte you can keep track of 256 things, with two, 64k things, or with a byte you can issue one of 256 commands, etc.

Of course, now we'll use a dictionary of objects with various properties to keep track of a bunch of 'true'/'false' strings...

We collectively act like RAM is free and so are cycles

Tangent: I abandoned C and then later Windows as a consequence of Charles Petzold's* book on win32 programming, the fact that so much bullshit boilerplate was required to get a GUI up on a OS literally named after its GUI windows...

*Fwiw I like his books, I just didn't like the way Windows wants me to do things then

It can depend a bit on the use. I'm watching content (Jellyfin) on a ThinkCentre M75n IoT Thin Client.

It's underpowered all around. Athlon Silver 3050e, 4GB DDR4 (3.4 avail & not upgraeable) but it's running Win11 enterprise IoT 24H2. The device would sometimes throttle the CPU for unknown reasons (not thermal, no throttle flags). Universal x86 Tuning Utility completely fixed that.

The experience is really good up to 1080p videos. It can choke on 4k but it's a bedroom TV; it's fine. Videos on Firefox are no trouble. I'm quite happy with it.

- stop making bloated stuff

My current "daily driver" Chromebook is 8GiB, and I've basically never felt a resource crunch while doing daily driver things.

I would never have chosen a Windows system with less than 16GiB, but the ChromeOS is so lean, and basically doesn't need to add a bunch of drivers or 3rd party software at all, and so everything fits in the 8GiB of system memory without any issue.

My local grocery store goes a bit further, selling € 280-350 laptops with 4 GB RAM and Win11 preinstalled. Absolutely bonkers.

I helped my mother buy a new laptop a few weeks ago and I advised one with 16 gigabyte of memory. She does not close tabs in Chrome...

I think this is slightly misleading. Modern OSes intentionally use available RAM for caching and will reclaim it when needed. The issue isn’t that Windows is “using 6.7 GB”, but whether the system is under memory pressure and paging. I’m not convinced the author fully understands that.

Related, great article about runtime memory in Linux: https://elinux.org/Runtime_Memory_Measurement

They do mention that the 8 Gig version of the laptop is stuttering while just working on Google Docs in a way that the 16 Gig version does not.

> The Surface Laptop would hang for a few seconds like this several times a day, even when I thought I wasn’t pushing it too hard. I’ve had these temporary freezes while just working in some Google Docs — no Teams call running or anything streaming in the background.

The issue seems to be that there isn't enough RAM for light multitasking or heavier applications without hitting the swap file hard enough that the system stutters.

This distinction is less a gotcha and more actually immediately obvious in the Windows task manager. It shows cached memory separately and in a different colour. The "in use" part is real in-use excluding the page cache.

On my current Windows 11 install i'm using 7 GB with just this Firefox tab open, and another 18GB of "Cached" RAM.

Same as how `free` on Linux shows it in a different column.

Windows 11 seems to reserve a lot of memory that isn't available to applications. The amount of in-use RAM on a freshly booted system is pretty high, and an 8GB system struggles under light load. I have one that can't run a VM on hyper-V, it just can't reserve even 512MB. The frustrating thing is that 6+ GB is in use but the applications visible in task manager add up to a small fraction of that, maybe 1-2 GB. I think it's being used mainly by the integrated graphics.

Microslop should stop adding slop like candy crush and 1990 fossil, react native just for the shake of backward compatibility.

Try using docker, then you’re really in trouble.

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