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

"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.

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).

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.

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.

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.

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

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.