Pavan Davuluri says the rising cost of memory is why Windows 11 will use less RAM, with work on the memory manager, WinUI 3 and WebView2.
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.
It’s hard for the younger generation to understand, but 4 Gb of RAM is MORE than enough for 99% of tasks if your software isn’t written by lazy idiots.
When the Raspberry Pi 3 first came out I was shocked how much it could do with less than a gigabyte of RAM (it technically has one gig but it shares it with the GPU). Linux is ridiculously lean when packaged right.
I have an Android tablet with four gigabytes of RAM that sometimes crashes running Firefox with multiple tabs, something the Pi somehow managed with a fraction the resources. Windows often struggled with eight gigabytes before I upgraded.
Raspberry Pi 3 first came out
I put Retropie on mine, the pi3b I think w/wifi, only emu that had issues that I wanted to use was the N64, everything else was butter
WinXP ran quite nicely on 4GB of RAM. You could boot to the desktop in under 5 seconds if you had a solid state drive.
All the day to day tasks someone needs to do with their computers haven’t materially changed in the last twenty years since XP held the crown. In that time the speed of processors, storage, gpus, and ram has increased by literal orders of magnitude.
And yet, somehow, things have become much shittier since then.
Because what used to be a native application that used 200 mb of RAM now needs to be a web application built on top of a browser using 4 gb of RAM to do the exact same task.
I will honest to God pick fucking Eclipse over VS Code every single day, because at least it runs natively.
I’ve been using Geany, was that a bad choice in hindsight?
The “enlightened” will tell you to use whatever you’re productive with…
…but the real answer is “anything that isn’t written in Electron and has no telemetry”.
My xp laptop came with 512MB of ram. I’m pretty sure 256MB was typical.
For real, OP must have been rich. I ran Windows 7 on 1 GB well enough. It got slow eventually but I used it until 2016.
What do you mean every app is not supposed to be a dressed up web browser?
you misspelled greedy companies
Yeah, I wish current devs would understand that I didn’t buy a shitload of ram for them to waste it. I bought it so I could have a shitload of things running at the same time. I currently have like 6 applications running and I’m using 20gb of ram ffs.
My friend bought one of those, paired with I think 64gb of EMMC storage which is basically an SD card. It couldn’t browse the internet really with Edge in it’s default settings. I had to disable so much crap but I got it usable with Firefox.
It would probably run best with that really stripped down version of ChromeOS
Nah, with 4gb you can get away with most linux distros with XFCE, and you could even do some indie gaming. Plus, using ChromeOS means you’re expected to have a network connection at all times (which makes things like using office suites locally a pain).
I’ve ran Puppy Linux off a 8gb flash drive on a system w/ 2 gigs of ram. It was by no means good, but it worked good enough.
Depends on CPU, would love to have access to hardware like this to play with to see what it runs. But I don’t want to buy it without trying it first.
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?
Yes.
i got my windows install down to 0 RAM by using Linux.
Blindly deleting windows partitions while installing Linux because you know with 100% certainty that there is nothing of value on them always feels good.
i used to work in IT and I would explain to people the only documents or files of any value are the ones they themselves generate, because that means they are unique. Also the first rule of infosec is redundancy.
Until you find out that your favourite software has gone obscure and the single uploaded to internet archive is missing a disc.
Lots of c:\program files out there with some cool shit in them.
Unused storage is wasted storage.
Cool story.
blocking permanently for moronic comments.
Lol
It will just hammer your ssd/hdd page file instead.
What a time to be alive.
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rising fuel prices push cooperations to make less hungry and more efficient vehicles.
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rising ram prices push cooperation to make less hungry and more efficient software
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but I can rent ram, storage and computing from your datacenters right?
and I can use that for my economic productivity and get the rest for my free time and entertainment?
thank you lords
You bet your ass we’re gonna start seeing a bunch of “pc as a service” products hitting the market soon. Thin client with good wifi antennas and everything is just video streamed from infrastructure owned by Amazon for you to use like a good surf.
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.
I disable every single new feature from all non Foss vendors. Theyre ALWAYS shit. 99% of the time its a shitty ui change for no reason and now shitty ai thats useless for no reason.
Whatever happened to good software. They all went to Foss lol
Publicly traded company shareholders, baby!
Any project worth its salt is privately held or FOSS lol
That’s why Valve/Steam holds the line. People think public corporations can choose not to be evil; they legally can, but it’s practically impossible. That’s why we need strong government and regulation.
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…
[ ] Source
Or maybe create GUIs without a webbrowser underneath again? Or are your students not capable of anything but web tech?
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
So in other words, it worked just fine.
All part of the goal of turning personal computing into cable TV by making everything web app SASS.
„We bought all the RAM and will rent it back to you later.“ -„AI“ companies
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 😹
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. 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.
which included a section on how to slim down images to make them download faster, as at the time nearly everyone were on dialup
I’m looking at you, lemmy sidebar header images that don’t get scaled down after uploading and are often > 5 Mb.
It’s wild reading about the old game systems, like Atari, and all the tricks and techniques they used to cram data and code into small amounts of memory.
