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Even Microsoft couldn't make Windows 11 work well on 8GB of RAM

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Re: Even Microsoft couldn't make Windows 11 work well on 8GB of RAM

#21

Post by pseudohadamard »

GeertB wrote: post #14

I remember that EMACS meant Eight Megabytes And Constantly Swapping, a reference to the Emacs editor requiring a system with 8 MB of memory and then still swapping. It was considered an exaggeration. Even Windows 95 could run OK-ish on a system with 4 MB of memory, with 8 MB being plenty. We have gained some things in the meantime, and lost some too.

My main desktop PC has 4GB of RAM running Windows 7 with all the crap disabled. The OS uses a few hundred MB, with everything else free for software development or whatever I'm doing with it.

I don't think I could get Windows 11 to even boot in 4GB even though it does about the same as Windows 7 did.

Re: Even Microsoft couldn't make Windows 11 work well on 8GB of RAM

#22

Post by PostOnce »

With a byte you can keep track of 256 things, with two, 64k things, or with a byte you can issue one of 256 commands, etc.

Of course, now we'll use a dictionary of objects with various properties to keep track of a bunch of 'true'/'false' strings...

We collectively act like RAM is free and so are cycles

Tangent: I abandoned C and then later Windows as a consequence of Charles Petzold's* book on win32 programming, the fact that so much bullshit boilerplate was required to get a GUI up on a OS literally named after its GUI windows...

*Fwiw I like his books, I just didn't like the way Windows wants me to do things then

Re: Even Microsoft couldn't make Windows 11 work well on 8GB of RAM

#23

Post by hulitu »

pseudohadamard wrote: post #21
GeertB wrote: post #14

I remember that EMACS meant Eight Megabytes And Constantly Swapping, a reference to the Emacs editor requiring a system with 8 MB of memory and then still swapping. It was considered an exaggeration. Even Windows 95 could run OK-ish on a system with 4 MB of memory, with 8 MB being plenty. We have gained some things in the meantime, and lost some too.

My main desktop PC has 4GB of RAM running Windows 7 with all the crap disabled. The OS uses a few hundred MB, with everything else free for software development or whatever I'm doing with it. I don't think I could get Windows 11 to even boot in 4GB even though it does about the same as Windows 7 did.

> even though it does about the same as Windows 7 did.

That is your opinion. Did you check the number of svchost.exe instances on the two OSs ? Did you check the number of system processes.

Win 11 has telemetry, to improve it. It really cares about your security, although the bad guys are still able to install ransomware. And, the most important, Windows 11 has rounded corners and 3D acceleration for the 2D windowing system.

See ? A lot of improvements. Now of course, you have 2 (gray) colour choices: light or dark. But this is because of astonishing advances in Computer Science.

And, last but not least, a quote from John Malkovitch: see youtube Space Force.

/s

Re: Even Microsoft couldn't make Windows 11 work well on 8GB of RAM

#24

Post by VBprogrammer »

pjmlp wrote: post #17
big85 wrote: post #8

It's bizarre to see 8GB spoken of as barely sufficient for basic uses. I remember when the baseline was measured in megabytes.

What to expect when the culture is to deliver Electron crap as "native" apps? The other day I heard on a podcast a guy complaining how hard it was to do backend software in terms of performance, his tooling? Node.js. Naturally when even Microsoft gets these folks as coders that is what we get, Webview2 all over the place on basic OS, C or C++ code that barely works.

One of the upsides of AI is that now all we need to do is prompt our way to native versions of these apps...

Re: Even Microsoft couldn't make Windows 11 work well on 8GB of RAM

#25

Post by pjmlp »

VBprogrammer wrote: post #24
pjmlp wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What to expect when the culture is to deliver Electron crap as "native" apps? The other day I heard on a podcast a guy complaining how hard it was to do backend software in terms of performance, his tooling? Node.js. Naturally when even Microsoft gets these folks as coders that is what we get, Webview2 all over the place on basic OS, C or C++ code that barely works.

One of the upsides of AI is that now all we need to do is prompt our way to native versions of these apps...

One would imagine, instead the Claude company ships TUI React Native apps.

Re: Even Microsoft couldn't make Windows 11 work well on 8GB of RAM

#26

Post by pseudohadamard »

hulitu wrote: post #23
pseudohadamard wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My main desktop PC has 4GB of RAM running Windows 7 with all the crap disabled. The OS uses a few hundred MB, with everything else free for software development or whatever I'm doing with it. I don't think I could get Windows 11 to even boot in 4GB even though it does about the same as Windows 7 did.

> even though it does about the same as Windows 7 did. That is your opinion. Did you check the number of svchost.exe instances on the two OSs ? Did you check the number of system processes. Win 11 has telemetry, to improve it. It really cares about your security, although the bad guys are still able to install ransomware. And, the most important, Windows 11 has rounded corners and 3D acceleration for the 2D windowing…

Yeah, I did forget that it has the visually stunning flat UI that everyone kept begging Microsoft to add. So maybe the multi-gigabyte memory size increase was worth it after all.

Re: Even Microsoft couldn't make Windows 11 work well on 8GB of RAM

#28

Post by TitaRusell »

praash wrote: post #27

My local grocery store goes a bit further, selling € 280-350 laptops with 4 GB RAM and Win11 preinstalled. Absolutely bonkers.

I helped my mother buy a new laptop a few weeks ago and I advised one with 16 gigabyte of memory. She does not close tabs in Chrome...

Re: Even Microsoft couldn't make Windows 11 work well on 8GB of RAM

#29

Post by trashface »

GeertB wrote: post #14

I remember that EMACS meant Eight Megabytes And Constantly Swapping, a reference to the Emacs editor requiring a system with 8 MB of memory and then still swapping. It was considered an exaggeration. Even Windows 95 could run OK-ish on a system with 4 MB of memory, with 8 MB being plenty. We have gained some things in the meantime, and lost some too.

EMACS was indeed big and fat back in the day but hasn't grown much and is downright svelte by today's standards. Currently its using ~80MB on my system, compared to 7GB for firefox, 1GB for signal desktop (a chat app! yes I know its electron) and ~840 MB for gnome shell.

Re: Even Microsoft couldn't make Windows 11 work well on 8GB of RAM

#30

Post by avadodin »

pathartl wrote: post #19
avadodin wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"640kBs should be enough for anyone"? I have 64kB and half of it is ROM and VRAM. I agree that It is silly that an OS that is still basically NT 3.1 needs 8GB to run. In early XP days, it was 32MB for the OS and 2GB for Firefox. I suppose the answer to the riddle is that now every program included in Windows is an Electron abomination with its own "Firefox". Soon, every "Firefox" will include its own slightly differe…

"basically NT 3.1" is an incredible over exaggeration. Total RAM capacity has stagnated over the years and subsequent generations of DDR have backed speed instead. 8GB in a computer was considered good in a consumer performance machine in 2010. 16 years before that was 6-8MB.

What seems like an over–exaggeration to you?

I agree that the time periods you mention saw different growth patterns and I would blame the stagnant software for the situation —it has slowly grown into the hardware with no real feature improvement.

Even the current path to exponential RAM increases is a naked king —1T models are only slightly better than 1B models at following instructions.

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