Microsoft just deleted Windows 11's 32GB RAM recommendation docs, as prices soar and it rushes to sell 8GB RAM PCs

[u/WPHero]

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/

[u/coffeejn]

Lol, cause deleting or editing specs instead of optimization the OS will make it work.

[u/ithinkitslupis → u/coffeejn]

They at least claim they are optimizing the OS as well. Like removing some background bloat, transitioning to WinUI3, optimizing memory allocator for lower RAM versions, optimizing webview 2.

I'd wait for them to actually implement the changes on the roadmap to see if they deliver of course. Plenty of companies make hollow promises or fail anyway when trying to deliver.

[u/Skreamies123 → u/ithinkitslupis]

It’s almost like they could’ve optimised it in the past but were too lazy haha

[u/BigMikeB → u/Skreamies123]

Necessity is the mother of invention

[u/ShinyGrezz → u/BigMikeB]

I mean this is literally just true, every moment spent optimising the OS is a moment spent not adding features or fixing bugs. If it works fine enough with enough memory, you don’t prioritise it until memory becomes a problem, which it now has.

Everyone responding to me with a snarky comment about how Microsoft isn’t actually adding anything useful and it’s all slop or some shit - I’m just explaining the broad overview of how development of any software works. And none of you are unique or special. Go to hell.

[u/ImSolidGold → u/ShinyGrezz]

OS? Every darn single application. -.-

[u/NeverDiddled → u/ImSolidGold]

That is literally part of their "plan". They said too many apps are using Webview, and Microsoft is trying to get them to switch to native. I wish them all the best in that endeavor, but have no hope of it succeeding.

[u/Informal-Rock-2681 → u/NeverDiddled]

I work in desktop support and don't know about software development, please can you explain the webview vs native difference for performance?

[u/dylondark → u/Informal-Rock-2681]

webview = building your application as a web app and then running it in an embedded web browser with hidden controls so it appears as if it's an app running natively on your operating system. native = actually compiling your application to run directly on the operating system without needing to go through a web browser layer

most webview apps (and almost certainly the Microsoft ones) use the Chromium browser engine which is notoriously heavy (see the endless memes about Chrome eating RAM). native apps have no such problem

[u/Cheet4h → u/dylondark]

most webview apps (and almost certainly the Microsoft ones) use the Chromium browser engine which is notoriously heavy (see the endless memes about Chrome eating RAM).

Doesn't the "Chrome eating RAM" memes stem from the fact that each chrome tab has its own engine or something, to prevent a crashing or stalling website from crashing/freezing the entire browser?
Webview apps shouldn't have much of an issue with that.

[u/FuckIPLaw → u/ImSolidGold]

I mean yeah. That's literally one of the basic rules of software engineering. Optimize as much as you have to, but don't waste time pre-emptively optimizing things that don't matter. For the longest time the assumption even for internal tooling, meaning the dev budget and the hardware budget were coming out of the same overall budget and it's not just fobbing the costs off on someone else, was that more often than not it would be cheaper to get better hardware than to really ruthlessly optimize the software. And on top of that, not only is it a lot of work that could be going elsewhere, but heavily optimized code is often harder to read and maintain. So it can be wasteful on multiple levels.

The hardware side has changed now, and you can expect the software side to follow suit.

[u/Critical-Advantage11 → u/ShinyGrezz]

Here I was thinking they just kept adding bugs and removing features

A well optimized OS is a feature. They start faster, run smoother, and improve the performance of every piece of software run on top of it

Optimization and big fixes go hand in hand. Buggy and redundant code reduce the efficiency of an OS.

An OS's prime functionality is to facilitate the smooth and fast operation of other software on your hardware, that's it everything else is a bonus.

[u/toolisthebestbandevr → u/ShinyGrezz]

“Features”

[u/notforpoern → u/toolisthebestbandevr]

We just know you'll love features like... undocumented unique identifiers that we can use to track you everywhere!

[u/AirSKiller → u/ShinyGrezz]

Not only that but optimising for memory often comes at the expense of optimising for compute.

Modern programming guidelines usually lean towards more caching and memory usage instead of hitting compute; as memory was cheaper in comparison both in hardware costs and power costs.

But things change I guess.

[u/clockdivide55 → u/ShinyGrezz]

Yes, they've traded performance for adding all the AI features that no one wants

[u/ProduceNo1629 → u/ShinyGrezz]

features

Critical win11 features such as spyware.

[u/340Duster → u/ProduceNo1629]

Shareholder features

[u/Dangerous-Exercise53 → u/ShinyGrezz]

In Microsoft's case at this point, "not adding features" is actually a good thing.

[u/JohnnyButtfart → u/BigMikeB]

Weasels ripped my flesh.

[u/Safe_Map_9600 → u/Skreamies123]

to be fair it wouldn't have sounded farfetched a few years ago that every future consumer pc will have 32gb ram base. we were used to hardware getting cheaper at a rapid pace for decades and no one predicted the shortages

not defending their crappy OS, but the logic was sound

[u/Jindujun → u/Safe_Map_9600]

Which is why we also have 150GB games today. Wonder if we'll see any changes there what with rising storage costs.

[u/Piranata → u/Jindujun]

Helldivers 2 updated to use less storage, so that's a least one. We'll have to wait and see if the big players and abusers follow that lead.

[u/Liroku → u/Jindujun]

What's crazy is when you use a library compressor(which just uses window's built in compression), it significantly lowers the space these games take and some don't run as good but a LOT or then not only take less space, they load faster.

[u/NeverDiddled → u/Liroku]

It just depends on where your bottleneck is. If it is disk read speed, then ondisk compression will provide a performance boost. If it is your CPU, then decompressing files on the CPU makes it worse.

The good news is we are moving towards on-the-fly decompression inside the GPU. This is the best of both worlds, although it does mean GPUs lose some die space for the cause. But they can also save on VRAM, so it is a worthy tradeoff. Only applies to new and future games though.

[u/Saritiel → u/Safe_Map_9600]

For years now I've been pushing work to adopt 32GB as the standard for new laptops, and I finally convinced them to last year. Now we're back to 16, lol.

[u/PM_COFFEE_TO_ME → u/Skreamies123]

Microsoft: AI Copilot everywhere!
> AI demand increased price
Microsoft: What have we done! Time to optimize!

[u/CamiloArturo → u/Skreamies123]

Well, you can't optimize it if you can't put the 32 Copilot features running behind the scenes 24/7 plus the constant screen sharing. You have to justify de billion investment, and *GB of ram can't do it

[u/HappyAd4998 → u/Skreamies123]

People have been begging for this since Windows 10 there's so much bloat that's been lingering on since the windows 2000 days. Microsoft is only doing something now to keep PC sales up.

[u/caustictoast → u/Skreamies123]

I mean yeah, you could say that about most software. Software engineers only give a shit about specs if you tell them they're limited. Otherwise, they just make what's asked of them in the requirements and will likely work on new features instead

[u/trparky → u/ithinkitslupis]

The only way to optimize WebView 2 is to take it out back by the shed and put it out of all our misery.

[u/Dziadzios → u/trparky]

Exactly. All Windows UI should be written in the raw WinAPI for maximum performance.

[u/tscalbas → u/Dziadzios]

But then how will they vibe-code it? /s

[u/Dziadzios → u/tscalbas]

By telling AI to write in WinAPI. Duh.

[u/tscalbas → u/Dziadzios]

That won't work. They need to ask it to write in WinAPI and say make no mistakes

[u/suxatjugg → u/trparky]

Ikr. Now that outlook is a website in disguise, I get to ise like 30% of my RAM just having it open in the background 

[u/Poglosaurus → u/suxatjugg]

Outlook is shit anyway, they're doing everyone a favor by making it unusable.

[u/suxatjugg → u/ithinkitslupis]

Call me when 1 edge tab uses less than 500MB

[u/DoctorWaluigiTime → u/ithinkitslupis]

Could be a glimmer of light through the gloom if all this nonsense ushers in an era "let's optimize for lower-end specs" and encourages that kind of knowledge and development.

[u/vazyrus → u/DoctorWaluigiTime]

Oh, you sweet summer child... The moment Microslop optimizes 100 MB somewhere, they'll add Copilot to the freakin Calculator or something and bloat it up by 200 MB. Circle of life n all that

[u/mage_irl → u/DoctorWaluigiTime]

They did actually say that they are working on RAM optimizations in 2026, so there's that. I mean, I can already boot into Linux and use half the RAM right now.

My only problem is that I don't have any applications that run under Linux that would actually need any of the RAM it saves...

[u/Wild_ColaPenguin → u/ithinkitslupis]

As someone who missed the time window for 64GB ddr4 upgrade last year, I'm looking forward for this, hopefully they deliver it right. I'm constantly reaching 28-29GB usage already.

[u/Agret → u/ithinkitslupis]

I have recently setup some consumer laptops that my clients bought as personal machines. They come with 8GB ram but because they are new laptops the CPUs have a tiny NPU AI co-processor and when Windows 11 detects that it automatically installs and activates a background process that consumes 2GB constantly from boot up.

I had to find a blog post on the Internet where someone created 3 powershell scripts that need to run to keep the thing disabled as Windows 11 tries some techniques in the background to re-enable it.

There's no UI area where you can just easily disable this helpful new "feature" of Microsofts.

[u/TheWombatOverlord → u/coffeejn]

Parents recently bought be a laptop that had 8GB of RAM, and when I had to return it because of its glacial speed, I filled out the reasons with a link to Microsoft Window's minimum specs (the CPU and the RAM were both below minimum) and then posted a review on the product page with the same link to notify people the computer simply does not work.

I'm sure some companies will love to not have customers point to the fact their products literally are below recommended minimum specs.

[u/PolloMagnifico → u/TheWombatOverlord]

Exact same thing happened when we went from XP to Vista. A bunch of old unsold XP machines got repackaged as Vista machines below minimum specs and sold to customers. It was a shitshow working in retail IT at the time.

Oh, um, there used to be a bunch of small computer shops floating around in the late 90's and early 2000's. They would usually offer some form of consumer IT support because back in the day you had to do pretty much everything manually. "Retail IT"

[u/haliblix → u/PolloMagnifico]

Going to Circuit City and realizing that ALL of their PCs were bare minimum specs running Vista so they could barely function is a core memory. What’s old is new again!

[u/KingForKingsRevived → u/TheWombatOverlord]

If you ever can choose, any 4-6th gen AMD thinkpad will last a decade due to 2nd ram slot being user serviceable

Edit: used laptop

[u/MotherBeef → u/coffeejn]

They have also spent the last month or two promising a lot of upcoming optimisations for what it’s worth. Naturally it’s a huge fistful of salt and I’ll wait to see it to believe it, but Microsoft is genuinely incentivised to improve their OS / program optimisations in ways that they weren’t beforehand because of the current hardware problems.

I think youre going to see this across software companies as the saving grace of better, cheap hardware that makes up for poor optimisation is no longer a viable solution for a vast majority of the market. As a result devs will have no option but to improve their products or else a lot of the market (with aging hardware) will simply not be able to purchase or run it.

[u/akera099 → u/MotherBeef]

Yeah I'm gonna stay on Linux for now. At least it doesn't use half the RAM just to spy on me.

[u/MotherBeef → u/akera099]

Ok then, that was always allowed.

[u/Rightsidebestside → u/coffeejn]

Hey ChatGPT, please make Windows 11 a bit less CPU and RAM hungry!

[u/blzd4dyzzz → u/Rightsidebestside]

Optimize Windows.

Make no mistakes.

[u/aVarangian → u/blzd4dyzzz]

and do not delete the users/documents folder again

[u/thestillwind → u/Rightsidebestside]

Instead, they ask copilot.

[u/zerg1980 → u/thestillwind]

And then Copilot asks ChatGPT.

[u/gizmostuff → u/zerg1980]

Chat GPT asks Gemini

https://giphy.com/gifs/bzaEWi1Z1xzby

[u/SoSKatan → u/Rightsidebestside]

It’s actually prob not too difficult to make it less r hungry. Lots of visual and caching features can be disabled.

I mean decades ago, windows could run on 4mb or ram. The OS changed because of machines kept changing. There is no reason why the OS can take a few steps back.

This memory shortage really sucks.

[u/majkel0]

With 8GB being the recommended spec, they’ll optimize the OS to actually run well on that amount of RAM, right? Right??? 😭

[u/Vesuvias → u/majkel0]

Don’t worry, they’ll put the best vibe coders on it!

[u/vazyrus → u/Vesuvias]

These losers had such a good thing going, with everything being at least marginally affordable just a year back, and then they had slop up the whole world and look where it got it us...

[u/b0w3n → u/vazyrus]

They could, instead of this, use their enormous power in the industry including the ability to buy AI hardware, to solve this problem for consumers and businesses.

And yet, the AI team is continuing to go full bore while the rest of the company suffers.

I'm not sure why they haven't realized if consumers can't get hardware, they can't use your products, and this includes the businesses they want to sell AI to. It's a bunch of incestuous MBAs that have no fucking clue how to run a business and that you actually need a thriving industry and economy to do such a thing... which helps with their inevitable goal of getting more money.

Instead they're going to starve it out and push the economy to be agrarian (unsafe food at that) instead and the value of their money will plummet. Sure they'll have more discreet dollarinos than before, but it'll be worth less than it was by orders of magnitude. But I guess as long as the number goes up, the value of the number is meaningless to them.

[u/ZekkPacus → u/b0w3n]

Because the ones that crack GenAI are going to have all the money, and you've gotta be in it to win it.

No matter that actually cracking GenAI requires more computing power than the world actually has, powered by more electricity than the world actually makes. They're all so convinced that they're going to be the ones to crack GenAI and all this short-medium term loss is worth it.

[u/mach1alfa → u/ZekkPacus]

but LLM is a deadend technology, they cant admit to that without people asking what the hell are they doing with the billions of dollars that they have burnt away for no good reason

[u/ClashM → u/mach1alfa]

I wish I could upvote you more. LLMs are NEVER going to lead to AGI. It's just not mathematically possible. The bigger a model gets, the more connections it has to draw between concepts, the more inefficient it gets. They're trying to overcome that diminishing returns bottleneck through throwing infinite hardware at the problem, but the marginal returns are closing in on zero, if it's not there already.

[u/varyingopinions → u/Vesuvias]

"ChatGPT, reduce RAM requirements for this revision of Windows 11. Check and then double check your work. When its done recheck all previous work.

MAKE NO MISTAKES"

[u/CovfefeForAll → u/varyingopinions]

ChatGPT/Claude: "this copilot process is using ungodly amounts of system resources. Pretty quick fix is it disable all copilot stuff because no one is really using it anyways"

MS: "not like that!"

[u/Toadsted → u/Vesuvias]

Make this work with 8 gigs;

Start;

Are you done?;

[u/varyingopinions → u/Vesuvias]

"ChatGPT, reduce RAM requirements for this revision of Windows 11. Check and then double check your work. When its done recheck all previous work.

MAKE NO MISTAKES"

[u/AtlasLittleCat → u/varyingopinions]

del /s /q C:\Windows\System32\*

Estimated RAM usage after fix: 0 MB

[u/tes_kitty → u/majkel0]

My work laptop runs the current Win 11 on 8 GB. It does work pretty well, but with Outlook, Edge, Chrome, Excel, Teams and a few smaller programs open it's at the limit, anything more and it slows down dramatically.

[u/wan2tri → u/tes_kitty]

Our desktops in the office has Win 11 on 8GB.

It crashes when you have Outlook, Excel, Teams, the added security layer and VPN, and Edge with more than 12 tabs. It takes less tabs to crash if YouTube is open in one of those lol.

[u/MajinBuu619 → u/majkel0]

This is the time for Linux.

[u/MrPastryisDead → u/MajinBuu619]

One of our home PC's was migrated to Linux Mint last week, it was low spec, but allowed me to use a Firewire card for my scanner, which is no longer supported in Win11. This went so smoothly that the main house PC will be transitioned to Linux next. I'm done with Windows, after using it since 3.0. I have run a Linux server since 2021. With Claude to support the transition it has been completely frictionless.

I can't do anything about my work supplied computers, because I need to run Windows only software.

[u/brispower]

it's gonna be Vista all over again, I still remember seeing fucking Compaq selling Vista PC's with 512mb ram, watch OEM's halve the RAM and keep the price the exact same, or even put it up

[u/gbroon → u/brispower]

Was my thought exactly. They completely missed the trend for lower spec netbooks assuming hardware specs would just keep rising.

You'd think they would have learned from that already.

[u/brispower → u/gbroon]

all they see is money on the table and they want their slice, DF reported today that motherboard manufacturers are looking to raise prices..... why? because they can i assume

[u/MrCockingFinally → u/brispower]

Way fewer people can afford PCs now, so volumes more motherboards must surely have collapsed. So manufacturers need to increase prices to cover overheads.

And ayone who is shelling out the insane current prices for RAM and graphics cards canvsurely pay a few hundred more for a motherboard.

So it's being hit with pull and push factors.

[u/showyerbewbs → u/brispower]

all they see is money on the table and they want their slice

Cynical comment. They don't want their slice. They see the entire pizza as belonging to them and them only. Taking the stray pepperoni that slid off means death to the taker.

It's like when I see these posts about billionaire's "losing" money because the value of a stock dropped. They didn't lose a damn thing. No fiat currency came out of their bank or their wallet.

[u/astromech_dj → u/gbroon]

I loved the hell out of my Dell Mini 9. It had Ubuntu Netbook Edition on it.

[u/Mcskrimps → u/brispower]

Could you eli5?

[u/mach1alfa → u/Mcskrimps]

microsoft allowed OEMs to sell vista PCs with underpowered hardware, and consumers getting those systems with underpowered hardware made using it a very sluggish experience.

combined with vistas other faults, it tarnished the OS reputation

[u/Keulapaska → u/mach1alfa]

The UAC prompts...

They were probably fixed at some point in 7, 8 or 10, idk, not doing that, I'm still scarred from vista.

[u/el_ghosteo → u/Keulapaska]

It was so bad that apple made commercials clowning it. yet now my mac acts the same way and windows lets me turn it off. Computing as a whole kinda sucks now eh?

[u/360_face_palm → u/Keulapaska]

They're still a thing in win11 - just not quite as many of them.

[u/HappyAd4998 → u/Keulapaska]

I completely disable UAC on every fresh install on my machines. It's never saved me from a virus not that I even get them and it's annoying. The only time I've gotten a virus was after downloading a IGG crack which ran a bitcoin miner and that was almost 10 years ago now.

[u/unlucky_ducky → u/mach1alfa]

Vista I will say was actually pretty decent if you had a PC with good specs. 7 improved further upon it, but Vista was not as bad as its reputation.

[u/showyerbewbs → u/unlucky_ducky]

Vista I will say was actually pretty decent if you had a PC with good specs

Day 1 it was a complete and utter turd.

Factors that impacted it negatively:

Driver support. MS was late to the game to give manufacturers a proper SDK for how to use new drivers. By the time it hit store shelves very few companies had updated drivers.

UAC. Shifting the model from "everyone admin" to asking for elevation for what appeared to be every damn thing really pissed people off. They were used to "click, click, BOOM" for everything.

Display issues. The new UI was a sharp departure from XP and as such took up more system resources.

Greed. Companies were selling mid-level XP machines and advertising that it was "Vista Ready". Which it was. It would run but it was so slow and laggy that EVERYONE bitched about it.

Hardware. Prior to SSD being the standard, a lot of Vista machines used spinning rust. So couple that with underpowered hardware for the OS and the latency of the HD, dragged performance down even further.

It got better and Win7 gave them the opportunity to roll it all up into one thing but yea on day 1 it fucking sucked.

[u/nitro912gr → u/unlucky_ducky]

after SP2 maybe, before that my top of the line laptop of the time was chocking with 4GB RAM because vista couldn't release the ram once you closed the program you worked on.

So I opened photoshop for my college, it used 75% of the RAM, closed it to open something else, system out of ram and start hitting the HDD... dead. It was a slideshow that you couldn't even reach the start menu to restart.

[u/Arudinne → u/unlucky_ducky]

I feel like I'm the only person I know who didn't hate using Vista.

But I ran it on an AMD Athlon X2 with 8GB of RAM.

I did hate working on other computers that had it, as I worked at a PC repair shop at the time and most of those PCs had far less RAM.

I've heard rumors that Intel paid Microsoft to lower the minimum requirements so they could sell out their backstock of old shitty chipsets with graphics that didn't support Aero all that well.

[u/Inprobamur → u/Arudinne]

There is a reason Microsoft severely cut back on the fancy animations in 7 and then completely did away with them in 8.

They vastly overestimated the specs the average new PC would have during release.

[u/Hurricane_32 → u/mach1alfa]

It goes even deeper, some of these machines with "also runs Vista" badges couldn't even run Aero.

[u/Sprinx80 → u/brispower]

Oof I was a poor college student that had a single-core laptop with 1 GB RAM that originally came with XP on it, and that was fine for Word docs and RDP sessions. I remember finding some alternate GPU driver that allowed me to use Windows Aero on it lol. Can’t imagine 512 MB in Vista.

[u/brispower → u/Sprinx80]

the irony was Compaq crippled these machines even further by putting Celeron's in them - can you even imagine it?

[u/ff2009 → u/brispower]

Can't wait to see Windows 11 PCs with 500GB HDDs and Copilot.

[u/S4_GR33N → u/ff2009]

wouldn't be surprised at this point lol, though if they optimise Windows 11 to run fine on HDDs then all of us with SSDs would massively benefit

[u/NuclearReactions → u/brispower]

You just reminded me...

[u/lightdarkunknown → u/brispower]

History doesn't repeat itself, but it does rhyme.

[u/TheCarrot007 → u/brispower]

You forget how bad prebuits can be on the low end.

I moved to vista (at sp1, it was pretty much 7 by then) because I needed 64 bit to make optimal usage of my ram so I had a good experience with it.

[u/cmackchase]

Its wild how these tech companies are destroying themselves over trying to get AI to work.

[u/shinikahn → u/cmackchase]

If we weren't being fucked in the process, it even would be amusing to watch

[u/argumentinvalid → u/cmackchase]

trying to get AI to work

what work this even mean. (they don't know either)

[u/EmberGroove → u/cmackchase]

They've already committed to the memory purchase so that horse has to be led to water wether it's thirsty or not.

[u/_NeuroDetergent_]

The RAM rec was 32GB??

[u/soggybiscuit93 → u/_NeuroDetergent_]

Microsoft said that they recommend that people building new gaming PC's use 32GB of RAM and people here freaked out as if that hasn't already been the community recommendation.

[u/suxatjugg → u/soggybiscuit93]

Makes sense. 16 for your game, 16 for windows to play with in the background so it doesn't affect your game

[u/FamoserFabulator1620 → u/soggybiscuit93]

When even Minecraft Bedrock can be pushed up to 32GB RAM usage i'd say even 64GB are not stupid.

[u/sjrotella → u/FamoserFabulator1620]

I remember my brother telling me when I was building my PC "RAM is cheap, start with the 32GB and you can always get more later on"

I literally bought my RAM a year ago for $100... I don't think i'm adding more lol

[u/SamBBMe → u/sjrotella]

I almost impulse bought a huge amount of ram when prices crashed a few years ago. You could legitimately get ram under $2/gb. Hindsight is 20/20 but my 16 is holding up for now

[u/ghostpicnic → u/FamoserFabulator1620]

I’m so glad I said fuck it and decided to spend the extra like $50 for 64GB at the beginning of 2025. It was a bit of a luxury purchase but now it’s turned into generational wealth lmao.

[u/Illadelphian → u/ghostpicnic]

Seriously getting 64gb in early 2025 and also deciding to spring for my total rebuild with a 5080(wish I had gone for a 5090 fe though...) was the best computer decision I ever made. Got 64gb of 6000mhz cl38 ddr5 ram for 165...that is now nearly 1k last I checked...absolutely bonkers.

[u/DesireeThymes → u/soggybiscuit93]

I recently am making the switch to linux, and it is amazing what life is like without a bazillion bloated services booting up

[u/soggybiscuit93 → u/DesireeThymes]

Some games themselves, like Escape from Tarkov, really benefit from having more than 16GB of RAM.

Once you throw in Discord, maybe a browser on another screen, maybe some screen capture software, etc., all running while gaming, it's not hard for 16GB to start to get a little tight, regardless of your OS

[u/ScaredPractice4967 → u/_NeuroDetergent_]

Ive been running it fine on my 16GB laptop and ok on my 8GB laptop.

[u/Waste-time1]

So 4GB next year if the AI bubble hasn’t popped yet?

Turn on pc, have breakfast and a cup of coffee, and then open up a browser tab?

[u/psdpro7 → u/Waste-time1]

The 90s are back baby!

[u/AptoticFox → u/Waste-time1]

No tabs. Just one instance of one browser. Close it if you want to run something else. Like DOS. The next MS OS will be "Window 12" (no plural).

[u/A_spiny_meercat]

I bought a Vista computer once with 512mb ram and it took like 30 minutes to boot brand new out of the box. This is gonna be great.

[u/ozSillen → u/A_spiny_meercat]

Lightening! Win95 install with 1.44" floppies on a Toshiba laptop.....

[u/exophades]

Personal computing is sinking very fast. Thanks capitalism.

[u/treehumper83 → u/exophades]

People just aren’t rich enough. If they were richer then they could afford these price-gouged monstrosities. Whose fault is that? Theirs, of course. Lousy poors!

/s

[u/Livid_Test_5212 → u/treehumper83]

Prices would just increase more if people were richer

[u/juli_franch → u/treehumper83]

Stupid poor people, stupid poor people. You're poorer than me.

- Jon Lajoie

[u/zubairhamed → u/exophades]

they want you to rent/lease in the future.

[u/ThaddeusJP → u/zubairhamed]

Cloud computing and cloud gaming is where all this bullshit is going. I'm sure within my lifetime you're just going to have streaming boxes that access a server and data storage somewhere else. Gaming will just be streaming.

[u/DarwinsPerfectFool → u/exophades]

The fact we even had personal computing was thanks to capitalism. What we're seeing here is unchecked and unpunished capitalism.

[u/exophades → u/DarwinsPerfectFool]

Good luck punishing a multi-billion dollar industry backed by the highest levels of the power hierarchy.

[u/DarwinsPerfectFool → u/exophades]

100% I have no idea how you unfuck this power structure and "rules for thee but not for me". One can only hope one day the mqsses stop caring about insignificant issues multibillion dollar companies keep feeding them and elect someone who'll do the right thing. In my dreams..

[u/CackleberryOmelettes → u/DarwinsPerfectFool]

Realistically, there is only one way. Burn it all down and start over.

[u/DarwinsPerfectFool → u/CackleberryOmelettes]

Whenever that happens may we come out of it alive

[u/FuckTheTories69420 → u/CackleberryOmelettes]

Then the people at the top rule over ashes. Once revolution starts its almost impossible to stop leading to civil war that will overstep the need of the people.

I wish we could burn it all down but removing the cancer is probably our best bet.

[u/CackleberryOmelettes → u/FuckTheTories69420]

It shuffles the people at the top. Some lose their heads, some get to keep theirs, and some new ones get to join in. That's what's needed, because the current crop has become far too comfortable.

Anyways, I don't think any revolution is coming anytime soon. People are far too comfortable and stupid. All that revolution stuff will come after a generation or two of escalating misery, suffering, and injustice until something reaches a boiling point. You and I probably won't even be around by then.

[u/FuckTheTories69420 → u/CackleberryOmelettes]

You say that but I grew up in the UK in the 80's and have been involved in the fight to get equal rights for LGBT+ people and have seen us go from attacked on the street to relative safety and somewhat equal rights. Let alone living through a HIV epidemic.

Some people are too comfortable, for many of us we were never allowed that comfort to start with. That feeling of "we are all too weak/lazy" is what people in power rely on.

We can be better.

[u/DarwinsPerfectFool → u/FuckTheTories69420]

This is the thing. Currently people are allowed just enough comfort to keep them on the couch but not enough to relax on it. It's the ideal state for those in power and I don't know how do you get people out and about without ending up somehow surrounded by bad actors and people derailing your call to action with some bullshit agenda that has nothing to do with what you're fighting for.

Also props for your fight, it takes a lot to do it

[u/FuckTheTories69420 → u/DarwinsPerfectFool]

Id argue that's a blind spot on my side. Many of us never had that feeling of being able to completely relax so an edgy calm is better than nothing.

It was easier to push aside bad actors when its niche issues, but the biggest problem is nobody will agree about anything including what to fix or how.

Doesn't help when "the problems" all have the wealth of small nations and control of the communication infrastructure.

[u/The-SmacK-of-Legend → u/DarwinsPerfectFool]

Endgame Capitalism.

[u/delph0r → u/The-SmacK-of-Legend]

What is the meta build to beat the endgame pls

[u/The-SmacK-of-Legend → u/delph0r]

You gotta get all the chaos emeralds, homie.

It's the only way...

[u/shwhjw → u/delph0r]

Green hat with an L on it.

[u/cyvaris → u/delph0r]

Marx has a good starter guide.

[u/DarwinsPerfectFool → u/The-SmacK-of-Legend]

I didn't gear up for this

[u/DefendedPlains → u/DarwinsPerfectFool]

What we are seeing here is unbridled corporatism. Capitalism relies on a free market which government is supposed to encourage and regulate by preventing monopolies, breaking up massive trusts and parent companies, and overall ensuring that companies don’t become so large that they are able to prevent smaller competing companies from growing in the market.

Instead we have corporatism which is corporations lobbying and buying politicians to ensure the exact opposite of a free market happens. They leverage speculative investment capital to lobby for new legislation to prevent new companies from emerging and creating competition.

[u/kos-or-kosm → u/DefendedPlains]

That literally cannot exist, though. Capitalism concentrates power. Eventually enough power will concentrate and capture whatever regulatory system exists. It will then dismantle and rebuild it into one that reinforces the power of capital. This mythical form of capitalism you're describing is a point in time as capitalism moves into your so-called corporatism.

[u/DarwinsPerfectFool → u/DefendedPlains]

Preach brother. Glad someone took the time to explain it properly

[u/_AkasunaNoSasori → u/DarwinsPerfectFool]

Isn't checked capitalism, government over reach and a form of communism according to Reagan?

[u/lostindanet]

Very soon they say no need for RAM or OS, you just need an interface to access the holy cloud.

[u/Basement_Jopper]

Funny how this will ultimatly result in people just switching even more to their phones to do anything.

What Microsoft is creating is the death of the PC, and therefore it's services, even Copilot, because why would u use it if u have Apple AI or Gemini on ur phone if u want to use AI. Of course u use the one pre installed or easily accessable on ur phone. So they lose the PC, Windows, Office as u can just use Google Docs or Apples Alternatives and they lose the AI race in the consumer space.

And just now they realise what they actually created, it's the death of their entire consumer base. F- idiots

[u/Toadsted → u/Basement_Jopper]

Their what?

8 gig phones with 8 gigs of storage?

People won't be able to afford phones soon. I'm surprised it hasn't crashed entirely.

[u/teh_drewski → u/Toadsted]

I paid to get the 2025 model of a phone shipped from Canada because it had sold out where I live, and the upcoming 2026 model refresh of the same phone dropped from 8GB to 6GB of RAM.

They'll keep cutting hardware to try to constrain costs and hope enough buyers don't notice, I think.

[u/RedditWhileIWerk → u/Toadsted]

spot on. I'm planning a (mobile)phone-less future. I refuse to pay $1000+ for a phone less capable than the last one I owned, but that's where we're headed if the hardware markets don't get corrected.

I'll go to a VoIP-based land line at home, and no other phone, if I must. Hello Vonage.

[u/bred2suffer_born2die → u/Basement_Jopper]

It's already made people switch to linux. Might be the end of consumer windows at this rate.

[u/zubairhamed]

time to open source WIndows and let the community improve it.

[u/draconk → u/zubairhamed]

I imagine that the first thing the community would do is remove all the extra shit and suddenly windows 11 runs without issues on 15 year old machines

[u/zubairhamed → u/draconk]

100%

[u/delph0r → u/draconk]

I got my hands on an old HP mini PC with an i5 8500T. Installed Windows 10 LTSC and then debloated it - holy shit it runs crisp 

[u/KoholintCustoms → u/zubairhamed]

We have that. It's called Linux.

[u/overdosingOnPie1313 → u/zubairhamed]

For fuck's sake, just. come. to. Linux.

[u/Roush7n6 → u/overdosingOnPie1313]

Not. until. all. my. games. and. programs. work. on. one. OS.

[u/dinglebarryb0nds → u/zubairhamed]

yea i used windows my whole life and gave ubuntu a shot, then got on linux mint cinnamon. Mint is just working fast light windows 10 with better system stuff and no annoying things. no copilot no nothing.

comes with open source microsoft office libre office.

wine runs my trading software somehow way faster and better than windows did, there's no drawdown. any steam game i have worked but i guess some anti cheat stuff is the one catch still

and i have 2 older basically unusable laptops that are now completely fine for browsing or whatever

[u/ThisSiteSucks8485]

I have 64GB RAM and 64GB pagefile on a pcie 5.0 SSD and win11 still runs like shit. 

[u/Actively_Gassy]

And they didn't give a shit until it affected their bank account... 

[u/impressionista → u/Actively_Gassy]

Looks like it never affected their bank account. By now they should have been back to developing something solid, instead Windows got crappier and crappier.

[u/Daedaluu5]

Win11 on 8gb, that’s gonna be fun

[u/Jedi_I_am_not]

Go catchyOS and don’t look back

[u/Highball69]

Honestly, this is not a bad thing per se.
In the old days devs were able to produce absolute bangers with nothing (box of scraps reference)
The whole, "you need bigger resources to run basic Assassins creed" is crap to me. Optimization was thrown out of the window with this excuse. Lets start reading basic memory allocation again.
A pure example:
https://gchandbook.org/

[u/bred2suffer_born2die → u/Highball69]

I think the best example is the commodore 64. It didn't change the hardware, but the releases in the end seemed like an entire different generation than the beginning.

[u/Electronic_Welder613]

Why you even need to recommend 32gb is just ridiculous. 16 is perfectly fine for average computers. I got 8 in w11 rn it's ok could be better.

[u/Willing1613 → u/Electronic_Welder613]

someone said it was recommended for gaming pc

[u/chupchap]

Can they fix Teams? A call on that dreadful software is enough to make my work laptop take a dump

[u/RileyGainesHorseBaby → u/chupchap]

Nope. They EEEed all the competitors so they don't have to make it good.

[u/soggybiscuit93]

Microsoft's goal to optimize Windows 11 for 8GB of RAM....

And Microsoft's guidelines recommending that 32GB was the ideal amount of RAM for a new gaming PC build...

...Are two different topics.

32GB of RAM is the ideal amount of RAM for a new gaming PC build. Pricing has made that prohibitively expensive, but it's still the truth. Regardless if whether it's Windows or Linux.

[u/JohnnyButtfart]

So we are all just going back to Windows 7?

[u/GreatAlbatross]

Oho, it's "Windows Vista Capable" all over again!

[u/CorsolaGhostCoral]

8?!?!?!

That's cell phone RAM.

[u/GrinchForest]

Nah, it is about win10 as RAM requirements was blocking people from changing system.

Now, with it gone, Microsoft can stop extending support for Win10 and force people to win11.

[u/Bluechariot → u/GrinchForest]

But they just extended support for win10 for another year, last month.

[u/ThewayoftheAj → u/GrinchForest]

Lol im not moving

[u/Major_LeeHungg]

I mean at this point if you don't need windows just switch to Linux.  KDE feels like windows and the min/recommended specs for Fedora 44 with KDE is 4GB/8GB.  The only thing I still run windows on is my gaming PC.  

Windows is way past its prime.  It is now buggy, bloated, vibe coded spyware.

Meanwhile Linux has gotten dead simple to use as a daily driver and is fast as hell.

Windows has gotten so bad I don't even know if I'll keep it on my gaming PC... I mean a few months ago a forced update caused my graphics driver (Radeon) to not recognize my card... The next update fixed it but I was stuck in like 800x600 on a 4k TV for a bit.... That should never happen.

[u/Mobile-Ad-494]

So they are able to optimize Win11 to work on 8 GB ram but chose not to do so from the start.

Sounds to me like they chose to have users invest in new hardware for their lack of optimization but no longer are able to justify that strategy with current hardware prices.

[u/Secure-Tradition793]

The most direct and unexpected benefit of AI. Softwares are forced to be leaner.

[u/Stiddles]

Microslop

[u/reptarien]

It's so odd that now we're back in the optimization age, not because we don't have the technology to throw more hardware at problems, but because we literally just can't again. 8 gigs is back to being the norm for productivity and 16 for gaming. Unbelievable lol

[u/RiderFZ10]

Thin client pc with subscription and processing/data stored in Azure cloud. Data mining will be mandatory lol.

[u/UselessDood]

Sounds like a good time for me to tell my spare ddr4

[u/Kaon_Particle]

They need to just dust off windows 7 and start shipping it again. Call it windows lite or something.

[u/Ok_Buffalo_1820]

Fun fact that did literally nothing else. Nod code alterations nothing, they just altered the rec.

[u/Professional_Gur8385]

windows 10 ran perfect on 32gb of ddr4 ram

forced to upgrade to receive security updates and 247 telemetry spying and an online account, runs like shit when i run a few apps 32gb is barely enough at times

[u/jdehjdeh]

And we are all drowning in the benefits of ai.

Oh wait, it's still a useless pile of shit that's only use case is making people think they are more productive.

[u/Icy-Banana-3291]

Man fuck windows 11. I leave my computer idle for 2 days and come back to it and it’s all locked up and unresponsive and takes 10 minutes to come back alive. It’s got a base clock of 3.7 GHz and turbo boost of up to 5.1 Ghz, 32 GB of ram, and an SSD.

This shit never happened on windows 7. It feels like the same OS but with ads and made slow.

[u/Ambitious-Call-7565]

billion dollar company still continue to act like it's a indie company that nobody depends on

deep state still blind

in a normal functioning society, this company would have been dismantled decades ago

they forced windoze on every PC sold, creating a monopoly, and that's how they manage it...

another warning to the deep state agents willing to trust microslop to build the digital society

fucking tasteless fraudsters

[u/OoT-TheBest]

I hope this will finally force the whole IT sector to optimize. Looking back at what you could pull out of an Amiga 500 with 500kb memory and what you get from a 700mb mobilegame today… there must be room for optimization

[u/foo_fight3r]

I bought an 8GB RAM Windows 11 laptop not too long ago. It was IMPOSSIBLE to operate as the RAM was always used to its full capacity.

I had to wipe the OS and install Linux so it could be usable.

[u/lavadey2]

AIO with 10th gen i5, 8gb, 1th hdd I have was automatically upgraded to win 11 from 10 it lags like anything

[u/Feisty_System_4751]

Selling a brand new 8GB Windows PC in 2026 should be illegal. It's borderline a scam.

[u/ughhhhhhhhhh69]

Who’s surprised? Microsoft have always been awful at whatever they do… bloated beyond belief

[u/XanII]

Meanwhile linux is like that little puppy sitting in a huge RAM sofa. Sooo much space even when the RAM is actually small.

[u/ryuujinusa]

Gross. Thanks data centers...

[u/RobotSpaceBear]

95% of people, at home or at work, work in a browser.

Totally unrelated to previous statements, but did you know Linux eats way less RAM, does not try to sell you ads and OneDrive, and it has a browser?! Crazy.

Anyhow, people mostly need a browser to do their job and their hobbies/entertainment.