209
Preloading File Explorer in Windows 11 Doubles RAM Usage, Offers Minimal Speed Boost
(www.techpowerup.com)
this post was submitted on 02 Dec 2025
209 points (98.6% liked)
Technology
77629 readers
1590 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related news or articles.
- Be excellent to each other!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, this includes using AI responses and summaries. To ask if your bot can be added please contact a mod.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
- Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.
Approved Bots
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
It's crazy to me that I'm recommending 32GB RAM systems to everyone now because I regularly get alerts for a good chunk of machines that hit close to 16GB usage.
My Linux desktop boots so fast and I can't tell ya how much ram on boot but I'm pretty sure it's still less than 2GB ๐
Windows is like 6 or 7 easy.
High memory usage isn't a problem by itself. Empty RAM is not being used. How the system performs when something needs RAM is more important.
My system has 96GB of ram, 24 of which is dedicated to a Windows VM. Right now, I have only 3.5Gb free because of everything I'm running.
The important thing is, if I run a new task that requires more RAM, my system will cleanly reallocate the RAM to where it's needed with no latency or performance hits, or stuttering.
In the meantime, it's not sitting there, unused and useless.
When I had Windows on this same system, with less RAM, it performed worse when it needed to swap in RAM.
The issue is when it's used inefficiently or for useless purposes. An unoptimized application takes 500MB of extra memory and that is 500MB that cannot be used for read/write caching nor another application, and 500MB closer to an OOM situation.
In theory, an application can suffer from issues of underutilization of memory, just as one that over-utilizes memory. In practice, I find that lower-than-expected memory use is a much more positive indicator of an optimization-focused project than one that uses more memory than expected.
If your system uses caching, then "usused" memory may not be so. Memory used for caching is also cleanly "Available" for use if needed. This is not the case with the 500MB of extra memory a process might decide to capture. Of course this is complicated further with swap (I wouldn't use it).
This is my point.