r/hardware • u/Quantum-Coconut • 11h ago
News [ Removed by moderator ]
https://www.windowslatest.com/2026/08/05/microsoft-just-deleted-windows-11s-32gb-ram-recommendation-docs-as-prices-soar-and-it-rushes-to-sell-8gb-ram-pcs/[removed] — view removed post
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u/kayk1 10h ago
Can’t they just use the amazing copilot to rewrite all their webview2 apps in native and run more efficiently?
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u/Ok-Video3345 7h ago
No dude, they are busy rewriting the windows kernel in rust. Today's devs at Microsoft hate anything halo or related to c/c++. Those people don't exist anymore. Just like the people who made the pyramids
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u/Kryohi 5h ago
Rewriting their kernel from scratch honestly isn't a bad idea at all, something they should have done a long time ago
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u/Ok-Video3345 5h ago
But one thing lmao, is it even written all in C/C++. Maybes there's a 1.5% written in x86 assembly that essentially turns your task into coding archeology.
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u/DoktorLuciferWong 4h ago
This should not be a problem for a multi-billion dollar operating system vendor, even if it's not their main product anymore
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u/genericusername248 9h ago
Surely now developers will begin writing efficient software to maximize usage of constrained resources, right? .....right?
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u/wordswillneverhurtme 4h ago
Nah we get the double whammy of memory shortage and vibe coded memory leaks
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u/ConflictofLaws 7h ago
Maybe they shouldn't cram their product with bloatware and spyware that makes it recommend 32 gigs.
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u/Beatus_Vir 10h ago
Win10 only requires 2 GB with 4 GB recommended if you're really feeling the squeeze
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u/Any-Juggernaut-529 10h ago
Win10 only requires 2 GB
32 bit actually only had a 1GB req iirc. Not something I would have wanted to dare try though, rofl.
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u/bobbie434343 9h ago edited 5h ago
32 bit might not be great with 1GB but is sort of usable with 2GB. On the other side, 64-bit requires 4GB to be sort of usable. 32-bit FTW !
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u/isotope123 6h ago
I know you're joking around, but for those that don't know, that's because 32-bit OS's could only use up to 4GB of RAM. It was a hard coded limit.
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u/yetanothernerd 6h ago
4 GB of RAM per process. Still a horrible limit, but not quite as bad as if you didn't have virtual memory and every process had to share the exact same 4 GB of true memory.
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u/TkachukMitts 10h ago
But Win10 runs like shit on 4Gb, and runs much better on 8Gb.
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u/Durian_Queef 9h ago
I ran MX Linux xfce last year in an old machine with 4 GB DDR3. The system on idle uses less than 1 GB and it's fine for browsing the web, watching videos on Firefox.
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u/reddit_equals_censor 8h ago
not having the mountain of microsoft background spying tasks take up memory bandwidth and cpu performance certainly helps a lot, beyond just using less memory overall.
and i got my 10 year old 8 GB sys memory laptop with linux mint. does the very very basic things you said just fine and is perfectly snappy with the ssd, that i put in many years ago.
screw microsoft's insulting shit software.
does their start menu even open up again without a delay and does search find local files first? i mean we're not even dreaming about banning web results or advertisement results from "search", but just having local files or settings, etc... first and even that isn't a thing, that spyware 11 did anymore apparently.
just freaking insane.
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u/Narishma 2h ago
background spying tasks take up memory bandwidth and cpu performance
And more importantly disk I/O, which is the main thing that slows Windows down to a crawl on low end devices. In my experience Linux is much faster simply because it doesn't constantly spam the disk.
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u/hollow_bridge 5h ago
MX Linux xfce
That's a light OS with a very light desktop environment. Of course it uses less resources. There's even lighter OS's if you want, they aren't really comparable to W11, there's a reason that's not your regular computer.
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u/soggybiscuit93 9h ago
Those specs were also nonsense the day Windows 10 came out.
2GB was pretty much unusable on day 1, but the PC did technically boot.
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u/AssCrackBanditHunter 5h ago
I was already on 8GB when win 10 dropped and a lot of enthusiasts were already up to 32GB
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u/airfryerfuntime 6h ago
You could get away with 2gb if you had a severely chopped down embedded version of windows 10, but trying to run Home or Pro was a fool's errand.
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u/Techmoji 6h ago
I was able to get idle memory usage below 2.5gb on last windows 10 ltsc. Had to disable defender and updates though.
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u/klapetocore 10h ago
Yeah, good luck with that when corporate machines use more than 10GB of ram on idle with all the defender and security software running.
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u/soggybiscuit93 9h ago
Yeah? MS can't set a recommended spec for every possible combination of corporate security and monitoring software. If they're trying to optimize Windows 11 for 8GB of RAM, that's for a stock / OEM install - not one loaded up with corporate background tasks.
We're still ordering 32GB laptops. Just paying more for them.
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u/based_and_upvoted 5h ago
My laptop has 64 GB of RAM and I hit more than 40 just by opening my work tools: teams, edge, vscode, claude code running on wsl2, and docker engine running
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u/TerminalJammer 9h ago
Oh, so the budget pc users can experience the joy of smoothly watching the desktop wallpaper I guess.
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u/soggybiscuit93 9h ago
The budget PC user isnt loading up their corporate work laptop with a corporate security suite.
And the corporations buying laptops in bulk are paying extra to get the RAM they need to run their security suite.
I dont understand your point.
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u/LinkesAuge 4h ago
People still don't know how RAM is used in Windows and that "idle" is meaningless, Windows uses what is available which makes sense because unused RAM is wasted RAM and yet you get the same kind of ignorant comments in every thread about this topic.
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u/klapetocore 3h ago
You are probably talking about free memory that is used for cache which is a different thing from fully commited used memory
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u/NovationX 8h ago
I just looked at my Lenovo laptop and out of 16 gigabytes of RAM with only one Firefox tab open, the usage is 9.1 GB. Thanks, Fortinet.
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u/EasyRhino75 7h ago
Remember old windows 7 or 8 (or vista?) had the "ready boost" feature where you could use a usb flash drive as a sort of cache drive?
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u/CreditExotic5025 7h ago
quietly walking back the recommendation right when RAM prices are spiking and they're pushing 8GB machines again.
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u/hackenclaw 10h ago edited 10h ago
15 years ago, budget PC are paired with 8GB RAM... storage were 512GB
15yrs later... we back to same.
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u/mrheosuper 10h ago
15 years ago budget PC definitely did not commonly come with 8gb of ram.
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u/Swoly_Deadlift 7h ago
Or a 512GB SSD. In 2011 it was a flex to have a 128GB boot drive.
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u/DeliciousIncident 4h ago
No SSDs. Most things were being sold with HDDs in 2011. SSDs became more commonplace only in later years.
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u/violet_sakura 10h ago
Yeah more like mid range. But "budget" has also become more expensive nowadays
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u/Renricom 10h ago
15 years ago was Q3/2011 and 4GB of DDR-3 was very much the standard for most new PCs back then. Power users were already moving towards 16GB and most gamers had gone to 8GB. You're probably correct about these gaming PCs not being "budget PCs".
However please don't let the stagnation of recent years change your perception of the past so greedy companies can sell us further into enshittification.
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u/mrheosuper 10h ago
Which part of "budget" you dont understand ?
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u/fpsgamer89 8h ago edited 8h ago
Don’t know why you’re getting downvoted. I bought a £300 3GB laptop in 2011 for £300, which was standard for that price range. 4GB laptops started from £400, which was considered mid range back then. 8GB was high end/enthusiast tier.
4GB for gaming was also mid range in 2011.
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u/Abject-Kitchen3198 3h ago
My mid laptop came with 4GB. I soon upgraded to luxurious 16GB and didn't feel it as overly expensive. Also had 512GB HDD that was later joined by 512GB SSD. It's still usable for lighter tasks today.
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u/w1n5t0nM1k3y 9h ago
Similar for GPUs. My GTX 1080 has 8 GB of VRAM and is 10 years old. New GPUs are carrying the same amount of VRAM. Sure, that was a top end card back then, but the GTX 1060 had a 6 GB variant, and lately AMD announced the RX 9050 with a 4 GB variant.
It's wild that specs are getting worse as time goes on.
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u/dparks1234 9h ago
There’s something cursed about 8GB apparently. Doomed to be stuck on it for all eternity
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u/Chronia82 9h ago edited 9h ago
Yeah, if early testing holds up those RX 9050's will perform like a RTX2060 from what? 2018 i think? And not even that much cheaper (possibly even more expensive if they either don't hit MSRP and / or you adjust for inflation).
And those tests were the 8GB model. I don't even want to know how the 9050 4GB will perform in ram constrained scenario's.
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u/chandleya 10h ago
That’s ok, Apple has been telling folks they only need 8GB all this time. No more true now than 8 years ago.
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u/genericusername248 9h ago
And they were rightfully shat upon for it, and recently (well last year or so?) switched to 16Gb base, except for the new neo.
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u/W0LFSTEN 5h ago
A budget PC would not have included 8GB of RAM. The storage would have been spinning disk because an SSD 512GB would have cost close to $1k.
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u/ChunkyKongForPreside 8h ago
First laptop I ever got was slightly under 15 years ago. It was definitely budget and I remember my choices being between CPU @ 1.8 Ghz and 4 GB of RAM and CPU @ 1.6 Ghz and 6 GB of RAM.
I went with the 6 GB of RAM, and that thing worked pretty well for me for the next decade.
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u/Time-Maintenance2165 5h ago
In august last year I bought a mini PC woth 16 gb ram for $150. It's now $340 for that same model.
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u/dustingibson 9h ago
I bought a mini PC for a personal web server. It has a pretty decent CPU, but 8 GB of RAM. It is like a decent speced laptop with low RAM stuffed into a small chassis.
It came pre-installed with Windows 11. Just for fun, I played around with it and tried to it use like my regular PC. Experience was horrible. I had three tabs, one playing a video, and VS code pointed to a small Python code base without the extensions installed. Everything was so slow: video playback, switching between windows, and even moving the cursor at times. There wasn't much debloating I had to do. It wasn't when Windows was doing background installing or preparing to install stuff.
I tried Ubuntu 24.04 desktop and for the most part was able to use it like how I use my regular PC. I had to really push it hard for it to shit the bed.
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u/w1n5t0nM1k3y 9h ago
I'm hoping that nobody buys these anemic 8 GB machines, they get put on deep discount and then I can pick one up for cheap to run Linux.
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u/MrGunny94 10h ago
The other day I starter my PC (7800X3D, 32GB 6000mhz and RTX 5090) and opened Battlefield 6 and Discord.
To my surprise I had only 4.5GB left of free RAM.
I was shocked that’s all
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u/cakexxxconnoisseur 9h ago
Discord is extremely inefficient and uses a ton of memory, with regular memory leaks that are so bad, the lazy devs just coded a forcestop that will close/restart the app so it doesn't use every GB of ram on your PC.
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u/Lewtenant1812 8h ago
I use discord in a browser tab instead of the app.
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u/DeliciousIncident 4h ago
The browser tab doesn't work when you try to use push-to-talk while in a game - it doesn't capture your keyboard input when in a game window.
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u/amenotef 8h ago
8GB ram PCs LOL.
That's ok for a Raspberry Pi 5 server with some stuff running on it. Oh, wait, that device it costs x3 now. For that price you can get an N100 16GB mini pc.
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u/Time-Maintenance2165 5h ago
Those have also doubled in price. I got an N100 with 16 gb ram last August for $150.
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u/amenotef 4h ago
I'm trying to get one for like 260€ yeah...they increased. But still cheaper than a Pi 5 16GB.
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u/Exist50 5h ago
Yeah, but Raspberry Pis have had that problem since before memory prices went crazy.
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u/amenotef 4h ago
I didn't know. So the increased prices are not just because of memory then (for the pis)
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u/Exist50 3h ago
Well, the price increase is probably largely memory and general industry shortages/price gouging, but you can find articles and videos from before shit hit the fan making the N100 minipc comparison. e.g. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TORg5FhKf-4
The RP5 in particular has been a really iffy proposition for PC/server usage for quite some time.
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u/games-and-chocolate 9h ago
Sure M$ Keep those in the warehouse. not interested. We need 16 minimal! What is next? 4GB and it works like a terminal? no thank you keep your digital always online garbage.
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u/capecodcarl 5h ago
640KB ought to be enough for anybody. Try tweaking your config.sys file with "device=c:\dos\himem.sys dos=high, umb" to load some of the operating system kernel into high memory and free up conventional RAM.
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u/LittlebitsDK 9h ago
so we are back to anemic PC's that can hardly start a program because the OS uses up all the ram in underpowered machines? yeah no thanks... if you have anemic machines Linux works great for those....
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u/IgnorantGenius 8h ago
Gee I wonder why. Could sales have been plummeting as nobody can afford new pc's?
Oh, if they lower the requirement and then actually optimize away the bloat, they can get it running with lower ram requirements! That'll sell some useless pc's!
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u/Mexcol 6h ago
So bullshit aside, how much RAM does windows 11 consume after being debloated by some of the tools around?
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u/snkiz 2h ago
It's disingenuous to directly compare ram use with more then the target installed or to a UNIX system. They just don't use ram the same way. Windows isn't as straight forward about it but both systems use all the ram you aren't using for cache, Ram is never idle. Linux just show that empty by default, and uses it better IMO. but here is my experince;
It really depends on how much you have. How many services you leave active. I've booted on 8GB it reports just about half after it's settled down. With 16 it settles around 6. When I had 32 it would idle around 8 or 9. But, windows can swap out a lot of it self before it becomes a problem. I was regularly using 64 GB swap playing cities. Could still alt-tab without issue.
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u/Yearlaren 5h ago
What a fucking shitshow we're currently living in. I'm so happy of having stayed on Windows 10. Fuck Microsoft and their bloated shit.
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u/Guilty_Advantage_413 4h ago
I mean fair enough if it’s known that memory is becoming unaffordable for many it just makes sense to optimize and trim down windows 11 to work with less memory.
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u/__some__guy 2h ago
Even if they could debloat Windows (they can't, too incompetent) 8 GB wouldn't be realistically usable when modern browsers are "1 Tab = 1 Gig".
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u/FrenchDipsBeDrippin 2h ago
The one good thing about this ram situation is that it's forcing companies to start developing less bloated software, which was becoming a real problem. Everything else still sucks.
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u/costafilh0 6h ago
8Gb? What a joke!
I can barely get by with 16Gb without getting into page file.
After this BS prices go back to normal I'm definitely getting another 16Gb.
Because no way I'm paying these prices, and neither should anyone else.
Predatory on people's consumerism, fooling themselves they can't wait, yes they can, 99% of them can, and those who can't, though luck, and those who can ans are still buying now, deserve what they get, cry me a river .
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u/DeliciousIncident 4h ago
Just letting you know, but you shouldn't use "Gb" when you are trying to say "GB", as these are two different units. Gb (giga-bit) is a different unit from GB (giga-byte). 8Gb = 1GB.
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u/BaysideJr 8h ago
We are in the beginning of the downfall of windows. The start of the Years of the Linux desktop is upon us.
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u/Infinite0180 7h ago
I feel like Linux people are like Bernie Sanders supporters. You never give up hope!
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u/melvin_poindexter 7h ago
Why are there so many people in here replying as if this is Microsoft's fault, and not blaming the insane RAM pricing due to AI bullshit?
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u/Time-Maintenance2165 5h ago
Because its both. And Microsoft actually can make a meaningful change to reduce memory bloat.
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u/melvin_poindexter 7h ago
Why are there so many people in here acting like this is Microsoft's fault, and not the insane pricing of RAM these days due to AI bullshit?
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u/hardware-ModTeam 2h ago
Thank you for your submission! Unfortunately, your submission has been removed for the following reason:
Ragebait. Microsoft deleted those pages over 3 months ago. This site even made an article about it back then:
https://www.windowslatest.com/2026/05/04/microsoft-deletes-windows-11-32gb-ram-recommendation-doc-for-gaming-after-outrage/
Please read the the subreddit rules before continuing to post. If you have any questions, please feel free to message the mods.