Subject: Re: "Microsoft itself accidentally proves Windows 11 minimum system requirements make no sense"
On Sat, 7/18/2026 2:31 PM, Joel W. Crump wrote:
https://www.neowin.net/news/microsoft-itself-accidentally-proves-windows-11-minimum-system-requirements-make-no-sense/
I find this interesting.ÿ I tend to think it's about right - 16 GB is a good idea, for modern Windows PC use.ÿ It's what I have in this four-core, eight-thread mini, although it's shared with its GPU, so I get more like 12 GB reported system RAM.ÿ Works fine.ÿ This is why OEM boxes are obsolete, unless you want to game, OEM/self-assembly can still matter for high-performance computing, but I can do all my shit easily with what I have, and it wasn't expensive, though I did pay separately for a legitimate Win11 Pro retail OS license, because I don't believe in using a gray-market license provided by the manufacturer of the hardware in China, they didn't obtain it according to the terms of Microsoft's license.
https://www.reddit.com/r/Windows11/comments/1u966pg/windows_on_arm_snapdragon_x_elite_is_using_too/
"I'm running Windows 11 ARM64 on a Snapdragon X Elite laptop... with 16 GB RAM.
After startup and only a few basic apps open, memory usage quickly climbs to around 11?12 GB (70?75%),
leaving only about 4 GB available."
The quanta to load up the RAM, might consist of (approximately)...
(1) Windows kernel, allow 350MB for that. It has been plus or minus
that much since WinXP days. The very first version of Win10, I
got that to run in 250MB, with the Memory Compressor railed for
the entire session. Later versions put on a tiny bit of weight.
When the 1GB minimum is observed for Win10, then the Memory
Compressor, it stops.
(2) A 2.3GB mini-version of the OS which is used as a Sandbox for
untrusted applications. This would be a read only file system,
like maybe a Windows Overlay Filesystem. If a computer only has
1GB of physical RAM, this cannot very well load, and the subsystem would
be shut off (likely without any comments either). The best platform to
test the behavior, might be my 3GB RAM laptop. Which would be a tight fit.
(3) On a box with a ["certified"] 40TOPS NPU or the like,
8GB can be set aside for an LLM-AI container of some sort.
There are multiple models now, that can fit in that space.
There are also impossibly-large models, in the 1.5-2.0TB range,
that very few home users will be ready to run. The 1.5TB one
runs at 0.1 tokens per second on a multicore CPU. The single model
I have on a machine here, runs at 10 tokens per second for the
most simple of queries (queries selected to make the token rate look good).
And that feels a bit slow, but I'm not complaining mind you.
When you add those three together, you're getting close to the 11-12GB number.
If you don't have an NPU, it just means some amount of "nuisance"
local LLM-AI can't run. A lot of the more complicated queries would
run in a data center, but some of the simpler stuff ("sharpen this photo") could just as easily run locally. There might be times a CNN or DNN is
loaded, a YOLO5, and we would not know what was in there.
When I asked an AI to draw a picture the other day, it emitted Python
code and told me the result would be revealed if I ran the Python. It
did not give instructions on how to do this, and the "card" it gave me,
needed hand edits before python3 (on WSL2!) would run it. It's a good
thing I am an ordinary user, and can take a joke. Imagine the look
on Granny's face, when she has to edit and run a "card". Think of the generations of Python coders we will be making (shudder).
Browser tabs can easily chow down on lots of RAM. Just the other
day, I visited the Lenovo web site, and a tab became unresponsive
and when I killed the browser, the tab was up to around 6GB. It didn't
even stop at 3GB, which used to be a "traditional value" for a runaway.
A cross-platform browser, should be able to do that on any OS.
You can see then, that to some extent, Windows low end boxes will
always feel like a "too tight pair of shoes". Going for larger RAM (>16GB)
is going to feel more roomy. It would be nice if these features
just had an on-off switch (like, make the OS only need the 350MB one),
but that would be wishful thinking. Even a 16+8 in two RAM slots,
for a total of 24, is going to feel good. Anything below 16GB is bound
to bind a bit.
But I can't say that out loud, because the price
of a 16 and an 8 this week, might be too high to contemplate. An article
today, an exec declares that "the price of consumer RAM is too high",
which means the fundamentals of the pricing are currently incorrect.
Unleash the hounds. Price fixing in RAM has happened before.
Paul
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