Optimizations To Reduce OS Memory Footprint Have Begun
While the official minimum specifications for Windows 11 sit at just 4GB of RAM, most PC builders advise getting at least 16GB if you want to have a smooth experience. In fact, Microsoft has previously recommended 32GB of RAM for Windows 11 for gamers, especially if they want a system that can handle games in the near future. Unfortunately, the RAMpocalypse has forced both users and manufacturers to stick with slower DDR4 memory and lower capacities. Some experts predict that the entry-level PC will disappear by 2028, and we’ve even seen some manufacturers, including Apple, reintroduce 8GB laptops just to hit a specific price point.
The RAM shortage crisis, alongside increasing competition, is forcing Microsoft to do better with Windows 11. Hopefully, these optimizations arrive sooner and don’t introduce new bugs, allowing both new and existing users to get more out of their systems.
The Windows blog post also gave an update on what improvements the company has made to Windows 11 so far. This includes a better Windows Search experience, more Taskbar and Start customizations, a more responsive and reliable File Explorer, among others. Many of these changes are still in preview, though, so unless you’re part of the Windows Insider Program, you’ll have to wait a few more weeks to months before you can start enjoying these changes.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Bentonite on Sunday August 02, @09:39AM (2 children)
All they promised was to optimize RAM usage, to make it less unusable.
Frankly, if an OS can't run with fine performance with *billion* bytes of RAM (1 billion bytes == 1GB), the OS is garbage and all copies should be deleted (if it runs poorly on 8 billion, it is 8x Kaio-ken garbage).
(Score: 3, Informative) by mcgrew on Sunday August 02, @03:27PM
To hammer it home, a thousand million. To describe the number "billion", a billionaire has as much money as a thousand millionaires, and Elon has as much money as four million millionaires.
And I can remember being amazed at having a ten megabyte hard drive! Now Windows needs eight hundred million times as much RAM as my entire hard drive used to hold!!!
The Stupid-Ass Voter Evisceration act: SAVE Trump and his family from prison
(Score: 4, Touché) by driverless on Monday August 03, @10:59AM
The only way to make Windows fly on 8GB is to tape an install CD to an 8GB SODIMM and fling it out the window.
(Score: 2) by looorg on Sunday August 02, @09:51AM (9 children)
It will be interesting to see what they remove. Will they remove the ads? Telemetry? DRM? Copilot/AI? Or will they do something horrible like limiting how many applications can be run at the same time?
I guess they could start with the LTSC/LTSB version. Then start stripping from there. There is a lot of "features" that can be removed, hopefully removed and not just temporarily disabled from running.
One wonders what that entails. Is it all the "features" they bloated search, taskbar and explorer with that are now getting disabled cause they used way to many resources. Temporarily gone, but not forgotten.
Hope ...
(Score: 2) by Username on Sunday August 02, @02:28PM
Eh, I've been using classicshell/openshell since Windows 7. It's the first thing I do on every install. The problem is trying to kill explorer.exe without losing folder viewing.
(Score: 2) by krishnoid on Sunday August 02, @05:14PM (2 children)
Or they could roll back to what actual people need to get the product installed under Windows Server 2025 [microsoft.com], and bloat upward from there:
(Score: 3, Informative) by vux984 on Sunday August 02, @08:17PM (1 child)
My experience with this has been pretty spotty. I've got a couple win server VMs running minimal resources because they run a couple very light services. One is a dedicated lab domain controller with like 8 clients, 5 users accounts, and a dozen groups. The only services it provides are DHCP, DNS, and AD for this lab net. Sure it actually runs just fine with 4GB RAM... but windows update seem to take 2-3 hours, every time. :/
(Score: 4, Touché) by epitaxial on Sunday August 02, @08:40PM
Pretty sure a 286 running Novell Netware could handle that with no problems.
(Score: 2) by Reziac on Monday August 03, @05:27AM (4 children)
Win11 actually scrapes by pretty well on 4GB RAM, somewhat better than Win10 does (when Win11 finds itself in reduced circumstances, it unloads a lot of the usual background crap). Even so, on 4GB a default setup only leaves about 500mb to work with. (I have Win11 netbooks so endowed.)
The easy way to recover a GB of RAM is to uninstall the Office365 launcher. It's the singular memory hog, and it won't stay disabled-at-startup. So off to the bit-bucket it went.
The rest of the crap most of us don't need (Game Bar and whatever else) reliably stays disabled and therefore has no impact on performance.
Search as it presently exists is utterly worthless, and has been worthless ever since they took away the Search popup with all the parameters to make it actually useful. This "start searching with the first letter typed" crap (and I'm lookin' at you too, Dolphin) on a large drive can bring a fast system to its knees, and the output is a worthless jumble that you can't even see all of unless your screen is three feet wide. I don't want a big damn third party index-and-search app, I just want a basic functional dedicated search back.
And they can just stop fucking with Explorer. I live in the file manager (for everyday tasks I don't like the third party apps, not least because I have often found them unstable) and every change has removed basic usability. Unless they give us back old Explorer, they're just going to make it worse, because it's clear their current UI people don't actually USE it.
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
(Score: 2) by cmdrklarg on Monday August 03, @09:22PM (3 children)
Win11Debloat works well to strip most of the cruft from Win11.
The world is full of kings and queens who blind your eyes and steal your dreams.
(Score: 2) by Reziac on Tuesday August 04, @03:06AM (2 children)
Yeah, I've tried that and a couple others, but find they're generally more trouble than they're worth. Experimented with that on an old Win10 box and now it never quite finishes booting up.
Pretty much everything I want knocked out is handled by Winaero Tweaker, which is just a nice front end for the registry. (It can also entirely disable updates, if you like.)
Back before the spike I cleverly maxed out RAM on all my PCs (none of which are spring chickens), so now the only ones that are tight are my netbooks, not expected to do great things anyway (I use them as a glorified portable word processor). But I'd sure hate to be scrounging RAM for anything more current. Ouch ouch ouch.
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
(Score: 2) by cmdrklarg on Tuesday August 04, @06:50PM (1 child)
Yes, it's meant for Win11; I had used an earlier version of it on 10 and it wasn't happy. There was a different one that I used for Win10, I forget which.
The world is full of kings and queens who blind your eyes and steal your dreams.
(Score: 2) by Reziac on Tuesday August 04, @08:49PM
Ah, good to know. Whatever version I tried said both 10 and 11, apparently this is not the case.
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
(Score: 5, Touché) by RedGreen on Sunday August 02, @12:31PM (3 children)
Stop it you are killing me, why don't you pull the other one it has bells on it. Somehow the masters of bloatware, the virus/trojan delivery system masquerading as an OS is going to do some competent programing for a change. Something they have not been able to do in forty plus years as a company. If you believe that I have bridge in Brooklyn going for cheap to sell ya. Frankly anyone using that garbage at this point in time deserves everything they get.
"Cervantes definitely was prescient in describing a senile Don fighting against windmills." -- larryjoe on /.
(Score: 3, Funny) by Gaaark on Sunday August 02, @12:47PM
Funny... my other one has duct tape on it! Have you been steering me wrong all these years??? :)
--- Please remind me if I haven't been civil to you: I'm channeling MDC. I have always been here. ---Gaaark 2.0 --
(Score: 2) by Unixnut on Sunday August 02, @07:18PM (1 child)
I was going to say something similar. In fact the first thing that came to mind when I read "Optimizations To Reduce OS Memory Footprint Have Begun" is that it sounds like MS is actually admitting that for the last half century they have not been optimising to reduce memory footprint, i.e. they were bloating their OS by design.
To me it seems at some point MS came to the conclusion that the OS is not supposed to be a thin abstraction layer above HW that allows you to run your apps in a portable way and with standard interfaces. Instead they came to the conclusion that the purpose of the OS is to run the OS, and that any apps that happen to run on top of it is at best a nice to have.
Not sure when it happened, I personally think when XP came about. Win NT/2000 was bloated compared to the previous versions but it did bring much better stability, usability and a standard API across the server and desktop OSes, making the desktop and server more interoperable.
However Windows XP was just 2000 with a RAM hogging theme. More compute resources needed (especially RAM), with no major improvements under the hood, but with slight incompatibilities with older software so you needed "compatibility modes".
From what I can see every version of windows from XP onward just became more of the same. More bloat in the OS, more resource hogging GUI features, more breaking of backwards compatibility, and later on, more monitoring, telemetry and spyware. Not exactly the purpose of an OS as far as I am concerned.
(Score: 2) by RedGreen on Monday August 03, @01:10AM
"From what I can see every version of windows from XP onward just became more of the same. More bloat in the OS, more resource hogging GUI features, more breaking of backwards compatibility, and later on, more monitoring, telemetry and spyware. Not exactly the purpose of an OS as far as I am concerned."
No clue on that I am simply an observer of the trash method of development now. I went past my 27th year of not using their junk this past May or June not exactly certain of the date in 1999 that a Windows "upgrade" left my Awe64 Sound Blaster card unable to play anything but a midi file. I went to the local computer store to get another card and seen this Redhat Linux I had been hearing/reading so much about there and bought it dirt cheap ran the sound configuration utility once installed then put in the settings for the card and had sound again. That was it for me and using Microsoft, call me crazy but somehow I like the sound to work in my multimedia files.
"Cervantes definitely was prescient in describing a senile Don fighting against windmills." -- larryjoe on /.
(Score: 4, Funny) by Gaaark on Sunday August 02, @12:50PM
I used to say that Windows, at best, is a gaming os. Now, it's not even that.
It is GARBAGIO!
--- Please remind me if I haven't been civil to you: I'm channeling MDC. I have always been here. ---Gaaark 2.0 --
(Score: 3, Insightful) by owl on Sunday August 02, @01:12PM (13 children)
Company most responsible for software bloat has marketers promise they will work on fixing software bloat.
Which brings me back to this statement, stolen from another arena:
Q) How can you tell when a marketer is lying to you?
A) Their mouth is moving....
This is just MS taking advantage of the RAM shortage to advertise they will do something. In the end we will have even more electron based apps that take up 1G+ of RAM to do the same task previously performed by a Win32 app. that needed only 25MB of RAM.
(Score: 2) by turgid on Sunday August 02, @01:50PM (12 children)
I remember when 16k was a luxury.
I refuse to engage in a battle of wits with an unarmed opponent [wikipedia.org].
(Score: 2) by janrinok on Sunday August 02, @02:08PM (10 children)
The first Microsoft offering that I considered to be useful was Win98. The minimum memory was 16Mb, and 24Mb was recommended.
I can't think of something that it couldn't do that I do today - although nowadays much more quickly. It was rudimentary but functional.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 02, @02:32PM (3 children)
The last Microsoft offering that I considered useful was Windows 2000! I switched to linux.
(Score: 2) by mcgrew on Sunday August 02, @03:53PM (2 children)
I never switched, but I was dual-boot from Mandrake until I finally just used separate computers. 10 will likely be my last Windows computer. I have a laptop running 11, but will probably replace the OS with Mint (if I can).
The Stupid-Ass Voter Evisceration act: SAVE Trump and his family from prison
(Score: 2) by aafcac on Monday August 03, @01:07AM (1 child)
That's more or less what I did, I had been dual booting between some combination of Windows, FreeBSD and Linux for decades, but with Win 10 hitting the end of it's official support last year, I made a permanent switch away from it. I'll be running some combination of Linux and FreeBSD from here on out. I'll likely have Windows running in a VM for the couple of legitimately irreplaceable Windows programs that I've got, but only until either Wine can run them or there's an adequate substitute elsewhere.
I was quite surprised by just how good Steam has gotten running on Linux. I may very well have had fewer crashes playing through FO:NV than I would normally have.
(Score: 2) by mcgrew on Friday August 07, @10:48PM
I'm stuck with Windows for editing with Audacity [audacityteam.org] until I can find a desktop with Mandrake-style scroll bars; I just can't edit Audacity files in Mint (or record them in Windows).
Whoever decided to change Linux scroll bars fifteen years ago must have been one of those noncompos who thought that since he always used the Page Up and down keys and never used anything but text that scroll bars are unnecessary anyway.
Someone once suggested that it was a Patent thing, but those scroll bars have been in use since at least 1995 if not earlier on the Mac, and patents only last twenty years. I blame lazy OS programmers; removing a useful feature is a Sony/Microsoft-type move.
The Stupid-Ass Voter Evisceration act: SAVE Trump and his family from prison
(Score: 2) by mcgrew on Sunday August 02, @03:48PM (1 child)
I found DOS 2.2 on a second hand IBM XT (1988) to be far superior to my Timex-Sinclair and Radio Shack computers running BASIC. I at least didn't have to write all my own software!
What were you running before Windows 98?
However, it did really annoy me that I had to do some fancy stuff in batch files to run my DOS games in Windows 95, but all of the new games required Windows.
The Stupid-Ass Voter Evisceration act: SAVE Trump and his family from prison
(Score: 2) by janrinok on Sunday August 02, @06:59PM
I started with a Nascom 1, changed to Nascom 2 [wikipedia.org] when it was released, and then expanded the N2 into a Galaxy. The Galaxy had CP/M, more memory and a 5Mb hard drive! I was never going to fill that, was I?
(Score: 3, Insightful) by canopic jug on Sunday August 02, @06:30PM
The first Microsoft offering that I considered to be useful was Win98.
I experienced MS-DOS 5 with no GUI as the peak in that company's product line and I'd say that W98 was well into the beginning of the end for them. I had W95 and W98 alternately on a laptop back when those GUI skins were current for MS-DOS. I could not decide at the time which skin sucked worse / sucked less. Both of those MS-DOS GUIs crashed every few minutes if one was working actively in multiple applications. And to get the modem working with either required about 30 minutes of registry fiddling and other changes.
The only two good M$ Windows-related things from that era were the browser Opera and learning to save when pausing or after hitting a comma, semicolon, or period. Opera not only had tabs, it could resume a session with the same tabs as were open when W95 / W98 crashed for the nth time between morning coffee and lunch. Form data was missing, but at least the pages were in place.
Money is not free speech. Elections should not be auctions.
(Score: 1, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 03, @07:59AM (2 children)
Can it run Tor Browser?
(Score: 2) by janrinok on Monday August 03, @09:38AM (1 child)
I don't know, but I do not use TOR browser very often, mainly for testing software. TOR is not as random as I would like it to be so I don't use it for daily activity. I seem to only ever get a subset of exit nodes, far fewer than exist. I prefer Mullvad VPN when anonymity is required.
Security wise, I have 2 networks supporting collectively 18 computers of various sorts, ranging from Raspis to multicore beasts with 32GB. Only 1 network has internet connectivity and my main network is completely air-gapped from any internet connection. Both are firewalled and have the appropriate security software and logging. Internally, I use Cat 5 cable throughout my home.
That might be one thing that my earlier computers did not do very well...
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 06, @12:36AM
(Score: 3, Interesting) by mcgrew on Sunday August 02, @03:39PM
Indeed, my first computer had 2k, my second 4k although you could expand both to 16k. When I wrote a two player battle tanks game in BASIC on the Timex-Sinclair it was laughingly slow, taking fifteen seconds for a projectile from the cannon to cross the screen.
So I converted the two player game (thanks to boolean algebra) to to hand-assembled machine code. Only a few hundred bytes and I had to add loops to slow it down enough to actually play it.
Bloat? In 1997 I had a 33 kbps modem, and Geocities loaded as fast on it as a newspaper loads on my 300 gig fiber just as slowly. Kids can't program their way out of a paper bag today!
The Stupid-Ass Voter Evisceration act: SAVE Trump and his family from prison
(Score: 2) by VLM on Sunday August 02, @02:50PM (11 children)
As a data point my newest chromebook is about one week old, about $200, 4 GB ram, exact same specs as my oldest decade old chromebook, and its fast as heck. Ten years apart and the only difference in specs or experience is the old one had a puffy battery after a decade and a replacement was about half the cost of a new chromebook... so I got one. I like the newfangled USB-C ports for charging and everything else. Pretty cool and fast.
The other 12 GB of ram on a 16 GB system for W11 must be for copy protection, gaming anti-cheats, and viruses.
(Score: 2) by mcgrew on Sunday August 02, @03:57PM (3 children)
I have a Chrome HP laptop and it's even worse than Windows 11. Speed isn't a problem, lack of software and inability to reach all of my network drives, or install Mint, is.
The Stupid-Ass Voter Evisceration act: SAVE Trump and his family from prison
(Score: 2) by krishnoid on Sunday August 02, @05:18PM (1 child)
Which network drives can't you get to on a Chromebook? I'd be interested in knowing where you have issues.
(Score: 2) by mcgrew on Friday August 07, @10:29PM
I have three 4tb Buffalo drives on my network, but the Chrome computer will only access one of them. I suspect it has to do with settings on the individual drives, they're designed for Windows but work in Mint. Or it may have to do with WiFi, although the phone, tablet, and Windows laptop all use Wi-Fi and have no trouble connecting seamlessly. The Chrome book doesn't have a wired network jack.
The Stupid-Ass Voter Evisceration act: SAVE Trump and his family from prison
(Score: 2) by aafcac on Monday August 03, @01:10AM
ChromeOS is quite slow. I've got a roughly 8 year old Chromebook that I installed Gallium OS on and it's much, much faster than ChromeOS. I haven't been able to solve the issue of my mouse occasionally freezing up, but it's in general a much, much faster system now.
(Score: 2) by Bentonite on Monday August 03, @07:33AM (3 children)
The whole idea of the chromebook is that it's not yours - it's google's.
Yes, Gentoo GNU/Linux, decent software and decently optimized binaries tends to run quite smoothly (ChromeOS is Gentoo, except with the freedom removed).
In my experience, Gentoo-libre GNU/Linux-libre does work just fine on a netbook from 2008, with a N270 and 1GB of RAM and the stock 120"GB" HDD.
Haven't had performance issues - the use case is mostly I/O bound anyway - compiles GCC just fine too as long as you leave it and come back later.
Still, I'm surprised that Chrome doesn't run horribly on 4GB of RAM.
For some reason, most ARM processors seem to suck performance wise, but Intel Atom, Intel Core 2 Duo etc have fine performance?
(Score: 2) by VLM on Monday August 03, @04:58PM (2 children)
Why?
On a W11 desktop (admittedly not the chromebook) with Brave (admittedly not chrome) it has 26 processes/threads open to display 3 windows with 9 total tabs open and its 2.2 gigs according to task mismanager.
For the LOLz i spun up a Youtube tab and its 2.8 gigs now, so a YT tab costs 600 megs which seems ridiculous.
I use Apache Guacamole a LOT, almost continuously all day long, to access giant machines and clusters and VMs and one of those tabs is open now. I'll open another Guacamole tab to SSH into yet another machine, browser went from 2.2 gigs to 2.4 gigs. So every remote terminal tab in the browser costs me about 0.2 gigs.
I opened a tab for the national weather service weather.gov and that cost me about the same 0.2 gigs. I'd think it has a LOT less javascript nonsense but maybe it does I donno or the cost of lots of javascript is a rounding error in the big picture of browsing (most likely)
Brave is more or less chrome with some spyware removed and probably some added in its place. I switched when I got mad that Chrome added split view to the right menu dropdown as a humiliation ritual for long term chrome users, essentially every time you open in a new tab using muscle memory it would split the screen instead, it was hell. Everyone hated it and I tried chome now and they apparently fixed the menu dropdown order. Big companies eventually end up creating most of their own problems to fix. I could switch back to chrome but its run by morons so I'll hang out with the brave browser morons until I get sick of them LOL. There are no good mass market software products anymore, only semi-working slop.
The W11 desktop this testing was done on is like half a decade old, maybe more, and has 32 GB of ram because I still occasionally have to run some Windows FPGA software on it but not always (very long story). Mostly I use it for non-serious stuff like games and goofing around and testing stuff like that. With 32 GB of ram, figure maybe 2 GB for the OS, 30/0.2 means I could open about 150 tabs into Apache Guacamole to ssh and rdesktop into "real systems". This PC is basically a terminal.
So far I haven't found a way to slow down or crash the chromebook. Admittedly this is a near identical replacement for a decade old chromebook which I also couldn't find a way to slow down or crash.
If your windows box is running slow and its less than a decade old it's probably stuffed full of rootkits or something. Low CPU demand tasks just don't take much CPU.
I haven't run an "app" on a laptop in some years, everything's been web based since the 90s. The chromebook does run any Android app so I run the same app my phone uses on my chromebook for VPNs. Works perfectly. I've only tried the android VPN app on my chromebook for my home/personal business VPN not to try accessing clients as I don't consider it a "work laptop", I don't really do the "work laptop" thing where I run client stuff on my laptop, I use it as a terminal. I have an android SSH client on my chromebook which I don't use but I have it as a backup.
(Score: 2) by Bentonite on Tuesday August 04, @01:18AM (1 child)
Chrome is widely reported to be extremely memory hungry when running JavaScript malware, but I guess normies have 8+ of such tabs open at the same time.
200MiB is a ludicrous amount of memory for a single tab of a poor quality terminal emulator.
According to ps, a bunch of windows and tabs of xfce4-terminal is directly using ~50MiB of RAM.
It's cute you think m$'s windows box doesn't come with rootkits.
After a few months to a year on a WC, junk files and junk registry entries start piling up and causing slowdowns - although it's possible to keep such garbage designed OS going for around a decade until it becomes totally unusable (windows 10 and 11 are meant to fix that flaw, but windows 11 instead does things like completely fill the disk with garbage files, which makes the WC unusable until the garbage is manually located and removed).
Odd thing to do to install an Android SSH client, considering that ChromeOS has a terminal emulator and GNU Bash and I'm sure you can install openssh and any missing GNU packages.
Google is so evil they put GNU Bash behind a setting they called; "Linux[sic] mode"
(Score: 2) by VLM on Tuesday August 04, @03:10PM
Your argument seems to be that Chrome is unusable on a 4GB machine because my primary use doesn't use 95% of the ram, but it would be usable if it didn't use 99% of the ram. Either way I think we got plenty of space.
(Score: 2) by Reziac on Tuesday August 04, @03:17AM (2 children)
Conversely, I put whatever-they-call-Chrome-OS-for-regular-PCs on a laptop that runs any other OS you like (i7-3xxx, 16GB RAM, Win10 and Fedora both run fine) and... I have never in my life seen an OS so freakin' slow.. It takes 3 hours to run an update, it takes measurable time to do anything else. And this is an officially- supported laptop.
And then to add insult to injury, it refused to install whatever-it-was that I needed ChromeOS to do.
[Gave up and bought a cheap Android tablet.]
Guessing your Chromebook isn't glacial because it's natively optimized for that CPU. Which is actually nice to know, should a Chromebook ever fall on my head.
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
(Score: 2) by VLM on Tuesday August 04, @03:20PM (1 child)
"Chrome OS Flex" will install on any UEFI laptop, desktop, miniPC, etc. I've had really good luck with it. Its appliance linux world; if it doesn't work there's nothing you can do, unlike linux where there's always something to upgrade, a special driver to select, options to pass on the command line, either it works perfectly or don't bother its unfixable by design. Aggravating, but what else can you do?
After google/etc refuse to support old chromebooks, its almost a regular PC so you run mrchromebox or similar older stuff that turns an old chromebook (6+ years old) into a normal UEFI booting laptop.
Then you meet in the middle. Its dumb that Chrome OS Flex will run perfectly on chromebooks they refuse to support for financial upgrade motivation reasons.
On the bright side its better than Android products where there's no bloatware on Flex and Android products generally don't get upgrades after purchase. I don't know if I'd want an "android tablet" knowing it'll never get security patches.
(Score: 2) by Reziac on Tuesday August 04, @05:30PM
I've got some cheap android tablets (the $60 Onn has much better build quality, but the $47 Sgin is a lot faster. They both run rings around the Kindle Fire.) For what I use them for I don't care if they never get security patches, tho they've had updates. Actually I've had notions of converting the SGIN to some species of linux with KDE Mobile, but haven't got further than mumbling about it.
ChromeOS Flex, that's what I was bitching about. I don't know about bloatware but on that officially-supported laptop it's a miserable experience. Fedora and Win10 run way better. Support officially ends in a few months, and then the experiment will probably end too. (I've got eight of these laptops, so experiments are their job description.)
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
(Score: 2) by Revek on Sunday August 02, @05:27PM
How very 90's of them.
This page was generated by a Swarm of Roaming Elephants
(Score: 1) by Runaway1956 on Monday August 03, @03:03AM (11 children)
Start by turning off unneeded services. You can look up Black Viper's old site, with configurations for Windows - just shut off all services that he doesn't endorse. He has multiple levels, so you can go scorched earth, or you can just shut off the worst resource hogs. Then shut down ALL AI-related nonsense. These days, 8 gig of RAM is not a lot of RAM, but it is sufficient to run Windows. Shut off telemetry and advertising at the router, in addition to Group Policy within Windows.
Fact is, Windows wastes a LOT of resources, doing shit that no one has ever asked Windows to do.
Over here in Linux land, no one configures their Linux installation to do all that crazy shit. Maybe in a corporate setting, the corporation sets up a few small parts of what Windows does, for very specific reasons. For example, Recall might serve some important purpose within the corporation. But Unix-like OSs don't set all that crap up for the sake of wasting resources.
FWIW - I've played with installing some AIs on this machine. They CAN BE somewhat impressive - but only somewhat. But, a Ryzen 7 PRO 2700 mated with an Nvidia 1650 is so very underpowered, it produces shit performance. No one should be considering a locally installed AI if they don't have much more powerful hardware. Yet, Microsoft insists on installing all of their crap on every machine that can conceivably run the current version of Windows. Preposterous.
Do the smart thing, and upgrade to ANY Unix-like OS. Linux flies on memory limited machines.
I said what I said. - Sophie Cunningham
(Score: 4, Interesting) by Bentonite on Monday August 03, @09:45AM (7 children)
Linux is only a kernel - you're thinking of GNU, which was Unix-like, but for long it has gone further beyond, as GNU's Not Unix.
Linux is only slightly Unix-kernel-like - sure it uses a monolithic design like proprietary Unix kernels and it's proprietary software, like proprietary Unix kernels (a bit less than a ¼ of it, used to be source-available and is also free software, although there are now efforts being made to turn the free parts into proprietary slopware) and it has /dev & /sys (but its interfaces are completely different).
Linux has really bloated up in recent years - even an extremely cut down GNU Linux-libre .config with not much more than ACPI drivers etc that is for a headless system, has an elf that is 7.4MiB and modules of 8.7MiB, so 16.1MiB.
As for a cut-down desktop GNU Linux-libre .config, I count a 14MiB elf and 7.8MiB of modules, so 21MiB.
As for binaries of GNU Linux-libre including all the free drivers, looking at; https://linux-libre.fsfla.org/pub/linux-libre/rpmfreedom/7.1/RPMS/x86_64/ [fsfla.org]
That works out to be; 145MiB elf and modules (606MiB extracted (still compressed)) + 2.0 MiB headers (9.1MiB extracted (still compressed)) + 316KiB free peripheral software needed for some drivers.
Adding the few KiB of proprietary software disguised as arrays of numbers in linux.git, that works out to ~616MiB (what a coincidence).
But that ~616MiB is useless - at bare minimum you need a shell to go with it, and libraries and a buildsystem for that shell (heck, you need a buildsystem and libraries for the kernel too), which Linux does not provide.
But that number doesn't include the proprietary software components of many drivers, as proprietary peripheral software, which is stored in "linux-firmware.git; https://mirrors.edge.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/firmware/linux-firmware-20260622.tar.xz [kernel.org]
That works out to ~1.8104324GiB, minus ~316KiB of free peripheral software included, ~1.8101311GiB.
Although of course there is some amount of duplication, due to a binaries that is slightly different, being a whole separate file on disk - but really each file has corresponding source code, which isn't provided.
So that works out to Linux being ~2.4116936 GiB in total for the binaries.
As a result, if my calculations are correct, 75% of Linux is proprietary software.
Please correct me if I'm wrong.
Meanwhile, a not bad minimal GNU system, that includes GNU coreutils, GNU bash, GNU grep, GNU sed, GNU less, GNU nano, cryptsetup and util-linux (yes, the Linux project also supplies some tools, to work with their kernel, for the GNU system) and all needed dependencies (such as glibc), as needed to work as an initramfs, or a recovery OS, is 36MiB uncompressed (but you'd want to at least add the GNU Emacs OS, which is ~300MiB) - you then of course need to add a kernel - looking at Debian GNU/Hurd, gnumach is 1.2MiB uncompressed (543K compressed) and hurd servers are 21MiB, so ~22.2MiB
The moral of this story is that Linux is now so bloated, recent versions can no longer work with memory-limited machines ("Open"WRT can no longer get BusyBox/Linux to work at all on routers with 32MiB RAM, due to Linux bloat - 64MiB is now the hard minimum for an OS that routes packets and does dhcp and not much else - but really the minimum is 128MiB and you run out of memory if you try to do much).
As for a fully functional GNU/Hurd system, I tried debian-hurd-20210812.img with 128MB of RAM and it ran just fine - Emacs and Emacs tetris work fine (although it didn't boot with 64MB RAM).
Still, GNU/Linux still works okay with 1GB of RAM, provided you use a decent DE like xfce4.
(Score: 1) by Runaway1956 on Monday August 03, @12:44PM (1 child)
-1 Pedantic, or +1 Pedantic? I'm not quite sure which way to moderate your post. In the real world, only a very small percentage of people care about the Gnu heritage. I run Linux.
Alright, let me try to meet you somewhere near halfway. I've not really kept up with bloat in Linux, much less other Unix-like OSs. Lemme ask Lumo what he thinks: https://lumo.proton.me/guest/c/dd121f65-1ab2-4bc9-bfc1-625429fb2ebe [proton.me]
I said what I said. - Sophie Cunningham
(Score: 1) by Runaway1956 on Monday August 03, @12:54PM
Oops, using the copy function for Lumo doesn't work quite like I expected. Lemme try that again, and, similar results. I'm copying the conversation, but when I preview my post here on SN, I don't even get the first example. Lemme try a more tedious approach.
I said what I said. - Sophie Cunningham
(Score: 1) by Runaway1956 on Monday August 03, @01:16PM (1 child)
After fooling with Lumo for a bit - I would like to get back to my core claim above. Not even Windows needs a fraction of the RAM that it claims to require today. If one only makes his own installation media, using tools like DISM to strip out the bloat, I am more than half confident that I can get Windows 11 running pretty nicely on a machine with only 4 GB of RAM. Maybe less than that. Of course, as we strip out bloat, we actually GAIN some speed and functionality, as we eliminate the first layers of totally useless crap. At some point, we may begin to LOSE some functionality, as we continue to strip away bloat.
I'll offer my own anecdote from a couple decades ago. I wanted to play with Windows XP, on an old machine. AMD 450 mobile CPU on a Super Socket 7 mainboard installed on a desktop machine. It started out with 256 MB of RAM, and ran like a dog. I scavenged more memory,and XP ran . . . decent I guess I can say . . . on 512 MB of RAM. I then invested in yet more RAM, when I stumbled over a great bargain. Windows XP ran beautifully on that AMD 450 mobile with 1 GB of RAM. In fact, it was more responsive than my wife's purchase of an AMD Athlon with (I think) 2 GB of RAM installed. The point is, I stripped Windows mercilessly, removing all the bloat that I knew how to remove.
More recently, I did much the same on Windows 11, and ran it for a couple of years. Before debloating, Win 11 was a real dog on a machine with 32 GB of RAM. After debloating, Win 11 ran very nicely. Since I only had the 1 module of DDR4 memory, experimenting with less memory was out of the question - it was 16 GB or nothing for testing purposes.
I said what I said. - Sophie Cunningham
(Score: 2) by Reziac on Tuesday August 04, @05:15PM
And I'm not sure what's wrong with your hardware choices, but that is not my Windows experience at all.
I do pretty much nothing to out-of-the-box XP (other than set Classic interface), and my first XP ran delightfully well on a P3-500Mhz with 768mb, and it did all the heavy lifting. (Photoshop, videos, and the like. That hardware was right at the minimum for DVD decoding.) XP continued to run well on whatever random hardware I threw at it.
The lowest spec system I ran XP on was a laptop with a 1GHz Celeron and 340mb RAM. It was decent, if not as slick as Puppy.
I have Win11 on a very low-spec netbook -- this one: N4020 CPU, 4GB RAM.
https://www.asus.com/us/laptops/for-home/everyday-use/asus-l210/techspec/ [asus.com]
It runs slick as snot for what I use it for (mostly as a glorified portable word processor). It even runs Win2K in VirtualBox (tho my XP VM won't load). Uninstalled the Office365 launcher to recover over 1GB of RAM, but I did no other debloating.
I also have Win11 on a desktop system that is over 10 years old -- 5th gen Xeon with 32GB RAM and an NVMe. Win11 runs like the wind. I have not bothered debloating it, just turned off some obvious crap like XBox.
My other daily driver is an i7-4820k with 64GB RAM and an SSD, and it runs XP64. This CPU benches within about 10% of the Xeon.
Both use a RAMdisk for temp files.
Care to guess which wins the GIMP filter rendering benchmark?
XP64, 40 seconds. Win11, 8 seconds.
I admit I was shocked. But yes, once you get into halfway competent hardware, Win11 generally performs better than XP64. You can see it in browser rendering, and mine both use the same browser (Supermium).
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
(Score: 2) by Reziac on Tuesday August 04, @04:51PM (2 children)
XFCE is way less optimized than KDE Plasma, and all other factors being equal, the difference in RAM used is only about 100mb. For that 100mb, KDE gives better performance. (KDE6 is somewhat more optimized than KDE5, too.)
A few years back someone on the PCLinuxOS forum did a head-to-head with all our DEs. PCLOS is a very efficient, highly optimized full-service distro distantly descended from Mandrake. Anyway, with PCLOS under the DE, these were the findings for total RAM used after a fresh boot, with default DE settings:
KDE, Mate, XFCE, all in the 500-600mb range.
LXQt, LXDE, Trinity, Openbox -- all in the 300-350mb range.
Having tried just about every distro-and-desktop combo known to man, I've found the DE really doesn't matter (except that one should stick to flagship DEs, because the DEs regarded as poor relations don't get enough love). Rather, the distro under the DE is what dictates performance.
Myself, in a low-RAM distro I like JWM as the desktop. (For a while I had Puppy with JWM on a 1GHz Celeron laptop with 340mb RAM. Ran like the wind.)
My own stark comparison, on roughly the same hardware: PCLOS/KDE boots cold to usable desktop in five seconds flat. Fedora with the exact same KDE and setup, two minutes to the desktop and another two minutes before it becomes usable. (These are my two everyday distros, so I see this regularly.)
Just for fun I dug out my least-capable x64 system and installed PCLOS/KDE. 2006 laptop, 2GHz core2duo, 2GB RAM, slowest spinning rust you've ever seen. Boot time is just under two minutes, usable after that -- only a little sluggish, but not terrible (mostly due to the slow HDD. With an SSD it would be pretty good.)
Even so, I agree with your base point -- nowadays every OS is loaded up with everything including the kitchen sink, the garage, the basement, and your kid's toybox, most of which no one ever uses. Back in the olden days I remember seeing an ordinary desktop distro loading... Apache. In what crazy world do normal people need Apache running??
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
(Score: 2) by Bentonite on Tuesday August 04, @10:38PM (1 child)
I've used KDE before and it wasn't as fast as xfce in my experience.
I stopped using KDE as it would break every time during the long Qt update process, until everything had been compiled, while GtK+ & GtK-3 is like 1-2 libraries, which don't take that long to compile.
I compile everything with -march=native -O3 for performance.
(Score: 2) by Reziac on Tuesday August 04, @10:46PM
My experience varies; I've had XFCE grind to a halt on a system where KDE was fine (same base distro). And I've never had KDE break, not even the oft-cursed KDE4.
I don't compile my own, tho. That's the maintainer's job. :)
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Reziac on Tuesday August 04, @03:32AM (2 children)
No one configures linux to do all that crazy shit... have you ever looked at Ubuntu??
Some years back, when Win10 propelled me to trawl every linux distro in the known universe, I ended up directly comparing Ubuntu and Mint. Ubuntu was sluggish, Mint was slick (this was on a quad-core with 8GB RAM), WTF since Mint is based on Ubuntu... so I made a point of watching for how much crap each loaded. Mint only loaded about 25% as much crap as Ubuntu, no wonder Mint is so much faster. -- Mageia wouldn't run on that system at all.
Black Viper (who back in the olden days lived right up the road from me) retired his Windows site, and it's now over on Github.
https://github.com/madbomb122/BlackViperScript [github.com]
Running local AI on mediocre consumer hardware (geared toward beginners):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U6_ZbW97-GY [youtube.com]
[It works fine when there's only onboard video. It does not like a 4GB Radeon at ALL, despite that the system I'm playing on has 32GB RAM. Apparently it sees the Radeon, tries to use it instead of system RAM, and throws up all over itself.]
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
(Score: 1) by Runaway1956 on Tuesday August 04, @12:57PM (1 child)
Actually - it's a long time since I played with Ubuntu. I got my wife on it, and she seemed to like it for a few years. With her next computer purchase, she went back to Windows. I had moved on from Ubuntu long before that. Maybe I spoke out of turn in my post, because I knew Ubuntu was going the wrong way long ago.
The video is informative. For various reasons, I've avoided Google's AI, and haven't fooled with them at all. Thanks for that one!
I said what I said. - Sophie Cunningham
(Score: 2) by Reziac on Tuesday August 04, @04:25PM
I've played a bit with duck.ai (ChatGPT 5.something-nano, last I looked) It's quite good, so long as you rein it in when it heads for the bushes. When it goes wrong, tell it NO right away so it doesn't get the bit in its teeth. (And no chit-chat, which needlessly spends tokens.)
Chris is the professor where you don't care what the class is about, you just show up to enjoy the lecture. Since I don't want my words going off to train Unknown Third Party's AI, I very much like the idea of running it locally. But first, a different vidcard.
Yeah, Ubuntu made Win10 suddenly look a lot better!! Egads, who thought a 27" cell phone was a good idea??!
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by jb on Monday August 03, @05:06AM (2 children)
Wasn't it Bill Gates who famously said "640 KB should be enough for anyone"?
(Score: 2) by canopic jug on Monday August 03, @08:38AM
Wasn't it Bill Gates who famously said "640 KB should be enough for anyone"?
Yes, a very similar phrase attributed to him was widely publicized at the time, 1986 or 1987 IIRC. Oddly, it was the first time that I had even heard of that idiot Bill Gates. Since those particular utterances of his were not well enough documented, he denies having said it. However, he is free to deny whatever, though the denials have no bearing on what was actually said or what actually happened.
Money is not free speech. Elections should not be auctions.
(Score: 4, Touché) by Bentonite on Monday August 03, @10:02AM
He didn't say that.
At a speech at a university, he mentioned something along the lines of that 640KB was selected as the maximum amount of RAM of an early version of MS Dirty Operating System, as that was deemed to be enough RAM for until that version was planned to become obsolete.
Additionally, at that time, it wouldn't make sense to map more memory than that, as the original 8086 could only map 1MB of memory at most, most machines shipped much less RAM than that and there needed to be RAM space for the BIOS, the display and the ROMs of various expansion cards; https://hackaday.com/2024/01/21/640k-was-never-enough-for-anyone-how-dos-broke-free/ [hackaday.com]
Later machines bodged on extra RAM above 1MB, which later versions of DOS supported.
The newer versions of microsoft software has always been designed to waste all available resources, to drive repeat purchases of DOS and then windows, as newer software would only run on the latest versions of m$ OS (sure, sometimes there was a almost complete unusable older release), which would only really run on the latest hardware.
Which of course required the purchase of new hardware, with the m$ OS fee as a fat tax on the price.
The winner has always been m$'s profits - the loser being the planet, due to the mountains of e-waste resulting.