this post was submitted on 12 Jul 2026
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Technology

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[–] terabyterex@lemmy.world 14 points 3 weeks ago (4 children)

everything else aside. please stop with this misunderstanding of ram. unused ram is wasted ram. the OS will give what is available. its good at managing who needs what. the problem ariaes is when an app isnt letting go of ram and taking more. so unless you have an app that needs ram and ia t getting it, its no an issue.

all that aside... i do t think a gig of ram for an ai to analyze your entire pc and running processes is absurd.

[–] Rhaedas@fedia.io 12 points 3 weeks ago

Yeah, the RAM isn't the problem if you have it, it's the CPU/GPU cycles to do what could be done with simpler tools.

[–] OwOarchist@pawb.social 8 points 3 weeks ago

unused ram is wasted ram. the OS will give what is available

But RAM used by this ai bullshit will not be listed as 'available' to the OS and cannot be used for other things.

[–] Kubiac@discuss.tchncs.de 7 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)

Copilot can't analyze your PC or the data on it. It's just a fancy web page, that hogs too much resources.

[–] albbi@piefed.ca 8 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)

The Copilot app for Windows also supports some additional features not available elsewhere, including:

Windows shortcut key
Wake word ("Hey Copilot")
Copilot Vision
File search
Take a screenshot
View web content
Windows Settings support

Source

[–] Ghoelian@piefed.social 1 points 3 weeks ago

wow, very fancy

[–] wizardbeard@lemmy.dbzer0.com -1 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)

Yep, plus, who is running Windows on a machine where 1GB of RAM is precious?

My work laptop has 16GB. It runs the full suite of Microsoft bloat (CoPilot, Teams, Edge, OneDrive) plus various antivirus and work security/monitoring tools constantly. I usually also have Outlook open, ~5 active tabs in Edge (with up to 20 inactive), an RDP session going, Excel, VSCode (often with long running scripts going), OneNote, Notepad++, and either YouTube for music or a teams meeting with video.

I've never had to close anything for the sake of performance except when I was installing a big program, doing a deep search through tens of thousands of files using very inefficient PowerShell code, while having all the rest open.


I'm not saying CoPilot using a gig of RAM at rest is OK, I'm just saying it's not the huge performance impact being implied.

[–] fuckwit_mcbumcrumble@lemmy.dbzer0.com 5 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)

On a machine with only 8 gigs of ram that 1 gig is very useful. 16gb+ not so much, but 8 gigs gives you about 4 gigs of useable ram before windows starts offloading stuff.

[–] wizardbeard@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 points 3 weeks ago

But that's kind of my point. 8GB was a good amount of RAM for heavy use with Windows a decade ago. It's unfortunate with the current costs of RAM, but 16GB is kind of the floor for modern computing with Windows.

I know the struggle. Around a decade ago I took an Android programming course. I was using a laptop on Windows 7 with only 8GB of RAM. It was fine for most of my other courses and for the light gaming I did on it, as long as I didn't have much else open. But Android development uses Android Studio. A Java IDE built in Java as IntelliJ, with a whole bunch of awesome but RAM guzzling features. Then Google strapped all their additional Android shit on top. Then to test the app you made, you were supposed to run an Android emulator that used at least 4GB of RAM.

I ended up having to borrow someone's old Android phone for testing, and I had to use another program to shut off all other programs and Windows Services while I worked. And saved up, and upgraded to 16GB of RAM, because it's what I needed for how I was using my machine.

It sucks. Developers, especially those making shit built into an OS, need to be far more aware of the resources their programs use and optimize better.

But at the end of the day our options are limited and we have to accept the changing times.

Or work around them. There are plenty of flavors of Linux if you need something lighter, or options to strip down Windows like tiny11 or Windows Ameliorated for 10.