ICYMI – Microsoft Definitely Never Said You Want 32GB Of RAM To Run Win11
Why Won’t Anyone Think Of The Streisand Effect?
Microsoft is living in it’s own world and loves reminding their customers of this fact for some strange reason. They inject AI into things in Win11 which make absolutely no sense, such as Notepad, and are then baffled by the negative feedback of users who were never asked if this was something they wanted. They make it harder to set up a local Win11 machine, guaranteeing a system spends a fair amount of time on the net without protection during setup. They also unloaded the burden of beta testing to their users after more than decimating their internal QA teams and then act shocked when Win11 users don’t appreciate it.
In almost all cases they have reversed course and reverted the unwanted changes, but refuse to learn any lessons from it. The latest evidence of this popped up earlier this week when a post declaring that “32GB RAM is the “no worries” upgrade for gaming, and 16GB RAM is the baseline“, as well as one recommending Copilot+ machines as the best choice for gamers. This directly contradicts the official minimum 4GB of RAM they recommended for Win11 machines, with 8GB preferred and 16GB for Copilot+ machines.
The post was obviously written with the help of an LLM, and while not only was the original nuked from Microsoft’s site and somehow removed from the Wayback Machine, the internet never forgets. We will remember that Microsoft would rather recommend 32GB for Win11 than do what they promised; improve memory optimization to make the amount of RAM needed to run Win11 far more reasonable.
The obscene price of RAM we are dealing with now makes their statement so much worse. Have you tried Bazzite or SteamOS yet?
Now, clicking on the old link redirects to the Windows Learning Center, which features general blog posts with tips and tricks on enhancing your Windows 11 experience, with no trace of the original post.
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Due to how inefficient it is, windows really needs 32GB of RAM as a minimum. The memory bloat has gotten pretty extreme over the years. consider this, the start menu alone in windows 11, uses more RAM than a fresh install of windows 7 used st startup (around 200-300MB of RAM).
A fresh windows 10 install uses about 2GB of RAM at startup, windows 11 wants to use about 6GB at startup.
While windows can scale back some RAM usage, e.g., it can ditch the cached aspect if available RAM is very low, which can drop about 2GB from the total usage, in the case of windows 10, it can drop about 1GB from its cached pool, and windows 7 can also drop around 50MB or so from its cached pool.
Windows 11 doesn’t seem to do enough different to justify its increased requirements, and especially its increased RAM footprint. Windows 11 doesn’t really offer any compelling reason to upgrade to it, and without the heavy push from Microsoft to end update support for windows 10, most users would not upgrade to windows 11.