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"Rising cost of memory," Microsoft explains why Windows 11 will use less RAM
(www.windowslatest.com)
this post was submitted on 04 Oct 2026
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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.
Heh. I have a core 2 duo (Compaq CQ45, circa 2010) with 4gb running Zorin Lite OS. For 99.99% for every day tasks (and then some) it runs excellently, with about 600-800mb in reserve before caching. We're talking YouTube, LibreOffice, multiple Firefox tabs, GIMP...all it needed was a cheap ssd to replace the spinning rust.
For context: this thing struggles to run Half Life 2 at any sort of reasonable speeds (though that's an iGPU issue to be fair).
Last glance this laptop costs $20AUD to purchase off eBay.
I'm right there with you. Not a single one of my daily use PCs is younger than 2013.
"Force has no place where there is need of skill" - Linux (by way of Herodotus)
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.
I put Retropie on mine, the pi3b I think w/wifi, only emu that had issues that I wanted to use was the N64, everything else was butter
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.
Can confirm that worked well into the Win8.1 era.
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.
I've been using Geany, was that a bad choice in hindsight?
The "enlightened" will tell you to use whatever you're productive with...
...but the real answer is "anything that isn't written in Electron and has no telemetry".
My xp laptop came with 512MB of ram. I'm pretty sure 256MB was typical.
For real, OP must have been rich. I ran Windows 7 on 1 GB well enough. It got slow eventually but I used it until 2016.
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.
And they wish you to understand that you should be prepared to pay more for better optimised software, but you're not. If it takes significantly more time AND more experienced devs to build native applications versus webview based, the cost of building native might be as much as 5x more, but you can't raise the price and you won't get any additional sales, because people may complain, but nobody would pay extra for better performance.
Is there some option where I can pay for an optimized version of Firefox? I certainly haven't seen it. What about windows itself?
Nobody minded keeping things tight before ram got cheap but it's suddenly a problem now that it's expensive again?
What do you mean every app is not supposed to be a dressed up web browser?
I still remember having a 4gb of ram on win7, and it's enough for day to day tasks. The only thing that prompt me to upgrade to 8gb is games. It's not too far ago MS recommend 16gb as a baseline for win11.