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.
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.
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.
Ah, my mistake, i missread. It “will” use less memory (like, maybe one day).
Was it because Win11 had a bunch of slopcoded Copilot bs? Inquiring minds want to know.
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
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 😹
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
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.
My first win95 machine had 32MB, win98SE had 128MB, win2k had 512MB, and winXP had 8GB, my win11 has 128GB.
This is why it is (often) so important that a new generation takes over. They haven’t experienced this as we did. They mostly don’t know.
So every new generation is a new opportunity to pull off this shit.
„We bought all the RAM and will rent it back to you later.“ -„AI“ companies
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
What do you mean every app is not supposed to be a dressed up web browser?
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.
I still remember having a 4gb of ram on win7, and it’s enough for day to day tasks. The only thing that prompt me to upgrade to 8gb is games. It’s not too far ago MS recommend 16gb as a baseline for win11.
4GB should be plenty for any general computing. I used to run Minecraft servers on under 1GB of system memory for an entire school classroom. It worked pretty well back then too.
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.
You mean Flex?
🤣 jfc
Bet. Some other group will just eat it up
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.
Yes, Windows 11 uses a lot of memory now. The point is that they’re working on making it use less.
doubt
Oh it may well be true, doesn’t mean they will succeed.
Yes I understood that but I am arguing against the implication they made when they chose this specific language and connotation, so I am insinuating that it will still use more than every other OS unless they gutt all the adware and spyware.
Use lessUseless
Ftfy 🤣
Their first step should have been to disable all the data collection and „AI“. If they were actually serious about saving resources.
Unused ram is wasted ram.
RAM that’s hogged by windows is wasted RAM. It should be used by programs and for caching.
Technically, it is being used by about 30 more background processes than Windows 10 had.
“unused ram is wasted ram” is only valid when that memory is buffer/cache. Except the windows UI isn’t allocating excessive buffers or cache that can be freed under memory pressure or when an application needs it. It’s allocating actual memory pages for the JS rendering engine and other bloated vibecoded services.
Not when your system just booted and is idle.
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.
Unused storage is wasted storage.
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.
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.
Hang on, how many surface pro owners are trying to run a local model i.e. local LLM on 8GB ram? I’ve got 32gb ram and it struggles with most larger models
Smaller models, probably.
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.
