This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
What a time to be alive.
rising fuel prices push cooperations to make less hungry and more efficient vehicles.
rising ram prices push cooperation to make less hungry and more efficient software
Or maybe create GUIs without a webbrowser underneath again? Or are your students not capable of anything but web tech?
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.
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 (at the time, PCs were still 386s, 486s and some Pentiums coming out, and most I used had either 1mb or 4mb of memory available). 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.
Yeah any time you hear devs saying “developer productivity “ you can associate the software they produce with higher ram usage, larger footprint, slower and doesn’t work unless your internet is fast.
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.
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.
I can guarantee that windows 11 will use zero gb on all my devices
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.
All part of the goal of turning personal computing into cable TV by making everything web app SASS.
It will just hammer your ssd/hdd page file instead.
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
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
It's not just the Windows OS that uses more RAM than others. Every bloody App these days left memory optimisation in the dust a long time ago.
The base OS itself is only a fraction of the issue
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.
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.
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
Sure, I'm going to start running my containers using WSL. Who knows what kind of wonderful surprises are in store in the network layer? How the environment parameter passing will be somewhat more brittle with funky new ways to break because of new characters you have to escape? I can't wait to troubleshoot all of that, and spend countless hours on MS forums and meet fellow colleagues with similar issues. What fun.
„We bought all the RAM and will rent it back to you later.“ -„AI“ companies
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
I'll believe it when I see it. I mean, Windows has a lot of auto-loading bloatware that Microsoft could cut, but I really doubt they'll actually have the balls to cut any of it.
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 😹
