Microsoft Says Windows 11 Is Now 'More Responsive', Runs Better On 8GB of RAM (theverge.com) 91
Microsoft says recent Windows 11 updates have made the operating system up to 20% more responsive by improving memory management and reducing background resource use. "A big part of that work is making smarter use of memory and system resources," says Navjot Virk, corporate vice president of Windows experiences at Microsoft. "We've improved memory management and efficiency across Windows to help keep more of your PC's resources focused on what you're actively doing." The Verge reports: The improvements to memory management now make a "meaningful difference" on PCs with just 8GB of RAM. "Windows can now keep up to 2GB more of your active data in memory instead of moving it to slower storage," says Virk. "For example, on PCs with 8GB of memory or less, Widgets load only when you open them, making more than 200 MB of memory available for your apps and other work."
Microsoft has also made Windows Update less disruptive, cleaned up the Widgets section, and finally allowed the taskbar to be repositioned to the sides or top of a display. Windows Hello sign-in has also been sped up, and Bluetooth pairing is more reliable, "including an AirPods pairing experience that's up to 15 seconds faster."
The next big step is a new Windows Search experience that's a lot faster and more capable. [...] It's currently available for Windows Insiders, and Microsoft says it will "roll out more broadly later this year."
Microsoft has also made Windows Update less disruptive, cleaned up the Widgets section, and finally allowed the taskbar to be repositioned to the sides or top of a display. Windows Hello sign-in has also been sped up, and Bluetooth pairing is more reliable, "including an AirPods pairing experience that's up to 15 seconds faster."
The next big step is a new Windows Search experience that's a lot faster and more capable. [...] It's currently available for Windows Insiders, and Microsoft says it will "roll out more broadly later this year."
I have only... (Score:5, Funny)
...640k of RAM, you insensitive clod!
Re:I have only... (Score:4, Funny)
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I've seen the improvements already. (Score:5, Funny)
Crashes and freezes happen quicker than ever now. Good job!
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Like Kent Beck says: "I now get to make a mess of a project in a week, instead of a year"
Re: I have only... (Score:2)
That should be more than enough for everyone!
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OS/2 Warp 3.0 could technically run in I think 4MB, yes MB. "Run" being a euphemism for "boot and get to a desktop in less than 72 hours."
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What on earth are they doing that it needs 8GB of RAM ?
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Sending all your data back to themselves.
Filling up RAM could be a good thing. (Score:1)
What on earth are they doing that it needs 8GB of RAM ?
The notion that an operating system cannot run well in 8GB is a pretty strong signal that a product's design has gone wrong. Now the core OS may be OK, and let's just say other monetization-based shit is where things may have gone terrible wrong. Or something like that.
OK, that said, ignore all the monetization shit and focus on the core OS. The core OS may use near 8GB and that could be OK. It could be doing caching of files. Why not, the memory would have just sat there empty. Might as well use it as c
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People misunderstand what is going on. It's not the OS itself, but all of the additional features that get installed and run automatically that cause the problem. Not everything requires printer support, but yep, it's there and enabled by default. The ability to change desktop wallpaper, or sounds, or all of this other stuff, it's in there. Translucency of UI elements, this and that, it adds to how much RAM is getting used.
While you can really cut back on all the stuff that SHOULD be an optional fea
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Found the other Amiga user!
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Re:I have only... (Score:5, Insightful)
Bill Gates should have been taken more seriously .. like think about it .. how the hell is 8 BILLION bytes not enough???
Up until, I would say the 90s .. we used to view RAM as a precious rare mineral allocated to us by God. Every bit had to be accounted for. You didn't just go allocating memory willy nilly. You can't be like malloc this, malloc that, as if you own the place. Every bit and byte and to be mulled over. You'd think "do I really need to use an int? perhaps byte or maybe even a boolean would suffice?" Sometimes you'd have to compromise "I really need a double here, but fuck it, all I have is two booleans" That's how we dealt with shit. Contrast that with you Gen Z fuckers nowadays who are like "hmm, I need to store an on-off state .. let me use an entire JSON structure embedded in an HTML file!"
You know what, fuck all of you!
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You know what, fuck all of you!
This is probably the best sentence (and post) that I have read on Slashdot in some time. Amen.
Re: I have only... (Score:2)
Re: I have only... (Score:2)
Widgets (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Widgets (Score:5, Informative)
You can exclude them from installing through an autounattend.xml (see Schneegans.de for help building one) and prevent them from display via a GPO. You really want to use a group policy object because otherwise a Windows Update might put them back; it'll override a plain old registry change or user preference any time it wants but GPO changes persist.
It is trivial to restore Local Group Policy editing on Windows Home SKUs with a little powershell.
Get-ChildItem @( /online /norestart /add-package:"$_" }
"C:\Windows\servicing\Packages\Microsoft-Windows-GroupPolicy-ClientTools-Package*.mum",
"C:\Windows\servicing\Packages\Microsoft-Windows-GroupPolicy-ClientExtensions-Package*.mum"
) | ForEach-Object { dism.exe
Some GPO settings are ignored outside the context of Windows Education or Enterprise SKUs, but most of those are related to user behavior data mining. I can verify that if you're just trying to supress OneDrive, Bing Search and Microsoft Account sign-ins, those are all maintained just fine even on Windows Home.
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I really do agree.
I maintain system images as part of my job, but it always made sense for me to extend that to individual devices since I am asked to help with them anyway. For me, this has been just adding a tweak here or there that grew over time. GPOs for Windows Home didn't become standard in my image management until Microsoft started inflicting Onedrive on everyone. Now I view it mandatory.
For what it's worth, I have a similarly long list of things I do when I configure a Linux system or MacOS. I def
Re:Widgets (Score:4, Insightful)
a Windows Update might put them back; it'll override a plain old registry change or user preference any time it wants but GPO changes persist
This is what drove me away from Windows. I would get stuff just how I wanted it, and then one of their updates would be rammed down my throat and break things again. Back when the updates had sensible descriptions attached to them, you could pick and choose which to download and when. Then the updates became less granular, didn't have good descriptions, and the user got less choice about when to download/install/reboot. Bye Windows. I don't miss it one bit.
Posted from a cheap laptop with only 4GB of RAM and over a dozen open tabs. Linux Mint FTW.
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Re: Widgets (Score:2)
I mean it's a cut and paste of three lines of powershell.
I wouldn't call the ins and outs of operating gpedit.msc trivial, but enabling on Windows Home is a couple clicks and maybe six key strokes.
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Re:Windows XP ran on 128MB of RAM (Score:4, Insightful)
The size of memory modules available went up by leaps and bounds. Of course operating systems and software expand to use all available memory.
Re: Windows XP ran on 128MB of RAM (Score:3)
The price of memory also went up leaps and bounds recently.
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Recently, yes. And that's why Microsoft is now focusing on reducing what's needed.
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Laziness and abstraction layers.
Re:Windows XP ran on 128MB of RAM (Score:4, Interesting)
Moore's law suggest a growth of 5796 over that 25 year period. But the typical amount of consumer RAM installed is more like only 64x (128MB -> 8GB).
It's not entirely that software got bloated, but that the hardware specs in some areas didn't increase as fast as in others. And an 800x600 to 1280x1024 display in 2001 with mostly front-rendered UI requires far less RAM than a 3840x2160 display with full desktop compositing and multiple backbuffers. On top of that, many apps and websites embed image assets for multiple resolutions and aspect ratios. The requirements bloated first, then the software was forced to follow.
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modded troll, slashdot linux users really are 62 year olds acting like edgy teenagers DAE windows bad?!?! windows bad! yes grandpa back to bed with you
That 62 year old was using Windows before Linux existed. And DOS or OS/2 or Mac OS or BSD Unix at the university, etc. Your cartoon meme based education pales in comparison. ;-)
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What's wild about people's interpretation of I guess not hating windows enough? Is that I've been using Linux as my main desktop since 96. And Windows 7 was the last version I've had installed at home as a secondary gaming computer, ditched that one a few years ago when Steam Proton was good enough for painless gaming on Linux.
I guess I don't earn very many fake internet points today.
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2001: Windows XP ran on as little as 64mb with 128mb being the recommended.
2021: Windows 11 minum is 4gb is listed as the minimum. I've never even touched Windows 11, so I don't know if that is realistic.
The minimum specs for each system is a 64x multiple, as you said. That's a good observation. I'm pretty sure in the late 90s I was running Windows95 with 96mb and my motherboard was capped at 128mb. Negligible ram on the graphics card. It also could have only been 64mb. I don't have a clear memory of what I
Re:Windows XP ran on 128MB of RAM (Score:4, Interesting)
What happened over the next 25 years?
Two things.
(1) We optimized for programmer convenience rather than code efficiency. We called that "increased productivity" and let ever faster systems sort out the inefficiency.
(2) The internet. This manifested in two ways.
(2a) Suddenly the OS role was not to sit there passively and manage system resources as directed by user actions. Now it had to "utilize" the internet somehow and pull down data live and do something with it. The OS now directed actions that would consume system resources, not just the user.
(2b) Monetization. The notion that eyeballs deserve money, and that the OS should get in on that game too. Hence Win11 taking (2a) to a ridiculous and annoying extreme,
Re:Windows XP ran on 128MB of RAM (Score:4, Informative)
Leaving aside inefficiency, security happened. Process isolation, kernel isolation, heck windows uses a hypervisor to load drivers these days. All of this adds to overhead (for legitimate reasons) on top of all the useless bullshit everyone else is talking about as well.
Vibe (Score:2)
I wonder If someone would vibe code Windows or at least cocoa (gnustep?) for the Mac OS X experience, I only use my Windows these days to repair my external harddisc after mounted to the blueray player. It is time to end the ERA of proprietary Operaring systems
They should rename Windows to "egacs". (Score:4, Informative)
Eight gigs and constantly swapping.
Why not earlier? (Score:3)
I mean, they could have done this ages ago!
Ah, yes, now memory is more expensive! I got it
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Now that the free ride Moore's law was providing for so
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Re:Why not earlier? (Score:5, Interesting)
It's hard to sell OEM licenses when OEMs are not selling hardware.
It's the singular thing that got them to think about efficiency - nobody can afford enough RAM to run their shitty operating system, so nobody is buying.
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It's probably ROI on optics. Now memory efficiency is a selling point they may make one or two half hearted attempts to make it seem like you can run Windows in a memory expensive world.
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Microsoft was all in on this shitty web framework bullshit. Not only were they wasting their own resources, they were key instigators into making others waste resources as well by seeing the Electron framework, declaring, that's pretty shitty ... but hold my beer!
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I mean, they could have done this ages ago!
Ah, yes, now memory is more expensive! I got it
Well ... yes. Microsoft isn't there to coddle you. The reality is that most people will bitch and moan and then use Windows anyway. They could be dismissed with "buy a better computer". The practical difference is that now there's a financial incentive involved. The push to restricted memory drives people to alternate OSes (remember the Netbook days?). MS now has financial incentive to invest in this process.
And it *IS* a process. This change has been 6 months in the making and they only freed a couple of g
Nice to see (Score:1)
Software bloat and performance regression tends to act like a gas that expands to the pain limit that its developers tolerate when they use their software -- and often past that point when the public uses it.
It's great to see reversals in the tendency toward bloat. Gone are the days where you could just wait a year and expect computers to be faster/cheaper then. I even see indie game developers on social media who make a hobby out of performance, by ensuring their games run fast on outdated hardware.
"Just" 8GB??? (Score:5, Informative)
I'm running Debian/Mate with 6GB total and I'm only using half of it. Pretty responsive
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Current Memory Use:
$ free
total used free shared buff/cache available
Mem: 7989460 1984016 1825448 557772 4805404 6005444
Swap: 19530748
The taskbar is a mess! (Score:5, Interesting)
Did no one at Microsoft on this feature think to install KDE Plasma, or Gnome, and take a look at how a professional product does a top position taskbar? Since it's a mess, and insult to any user who wanted this feature, it's incomplete and has yet again proven Microsoft doesn't respect their user base. It's broken enough that you have to leave it bottom positioned not to get annoyed or wonder what hard drug the designers were using.
Re:The taskbar is a mess! (Score:5, Insightful)
Much like the start menu. Worked fine from 95 through 10, then how many years did it take MS to finally let us make Win11's behave like, y'know, some kind of "menu" for "start"ing installed programs?
I dare say the only reason people have finally started saying "Y'know, Win11 is halfway usable" is because Microsoft finally started letting us revert the look and feel back in the direction of XP.
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Vibe coded windows (Score:3, Funny)
Some intern got hold the source code and a Claude license and massively improved windoze.. We know from experience Microsoft programmers could not program their way out of a wet paper bag with scissors in their hands.
The fuck they did (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:The fuck they did (Score:4, Interesting)
26h2 adds in about 3GB of RAM worth of AI bullshit in the background so my ass they did.
Except they did no such thing and virtually everyone has confirmed the usage reduction. Did you subscribe to the extra AI bullshit or something? I mean I have zero MB of RAM dedicated to any AI bullshit on my Windows 11 machine and I didn't need to do anything magic to disable anything.
But (Score:5, Interesting)
But it's still Windows 11. Puke.
Finally! (Score:5, Insightful)
Microsoft has also made Windows Update less disruptive
Took them long enough. It's fucking annoying to start the work day and then not be able to use the computer for half an hour because Windows $%#^& Update is hogging 100% of resources.
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I really doubt that they finally fixed their scheduler to actually de-prioritize background tasks properly. That would be bigger news.
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If windows update is using your resources for half an hour every work day you either have a fucked up computer, or the worlds most relaxed work schedule. Do you only work on the second Tuesday of the month or something?
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You'll notice I didn't say it happens every day.
And the mouse-click issue? (Score:4, Insightful)
There is still the issue of mouse-clicks not registering. It could be anywhere. You click in a text box on a web page and the mouse doesn't get put there. Click an option in a piece of software and nothing happens. Try to double-click and the software/file doesn't open.
At this point I click something once then hit Enter about half the time since I know that will work.
This has been happening since Windows 10 so it's not specific to 11.
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Oh, this has been a problem since at least Windows 7, and it probably originated with Vista. It's the first thing I noticed after updating from XP, and it's been driving me batty on ALL my machines, regardless of hardware configuration, for well over a decade.
There's a LOT of responsiveness issues associated with the WDM. Thankfully missed input events only affect desktop applications. Anything that runs in fullscreen or overlay mode works fine.
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All the mice I use are hardwired.
DOS (Score:2)
DOS was written mostly in Assembly. The programs were small and fast. Maybe with AI we can get back to making more things in Assembly, keeping them tight and fast.
Too little, too late (Score:4, Informative)
None of the awful things about Win11 are ram usage.
You know what else saves ram?
Letting us turn off all the unwanted shit you put in there.
I don't need ads in my start menu. I don't need web search results in my start menu. I don't need sharepoint in my start menu.
I do need the programs I have installed on my computer there.
More than 50% of the time the full-retail/enterprise w11 start menu fails to find a program that I know is actually installed. But it can show me irrelevant web search results...
The architecture and product decisions are wrong and cannot be fixed until they are changed. The problem is not lack of efficiency or implementation bugs.
The problem is that it is doing the wrong things for the wrong reasons.
Re:Too little, too late (Score:4, Funny)
I don't need web search results in my start menu.
They literally added the ability to turn that off with this update (it was a registry / group polity item in the past).
I don't need ads in my start menu.
You've always been able to turn that off.
I don't need sharepoint in my start menu.
Sharepoint doesn't run in your startmenu. I assume you mean Onedrive, and you've always had the ability to turn that off and not run it at all.
I do need the programs I have installed on my computer there.
Were you missing programs? Not sure what your point is here.
More than 50% of the time the full-retail/enterprise w11 start menu fails to find a program that I know is actually installed.
One of the things this update did was fix their stupid search / typo heuristics. The find has actually DRAMATICALLY improved. If you have a program and you type its name it should now be the top result of the search and auto-highlighted.
The architecture and product decisions are wrong and cannot be fixed until they are changed.
You are blinded with rage. They literally fixed the things you are complaining about, and you are posting your complaints on the very story about the version in which they were fixed. How about you actually use the product before commenting on it?
The problem is that it is doing the wrong things for the wrong reasons.
No the problem is their users appear to be stupid.
Oh joys (Score:2)
The really want Win11 performance to be fast ... (Score:1)
... so their advertisements play smoother.
Speaking of Search... (Score:2)
They finally included an option to NOT SEARCH THE DAMN WEB from the Start menu. That setting alone has made Windows far more responsive, something you previously could only do with a registry change.
Hey, here's an idea... (Score:2)
"A big part of that work is making smarter use of memory and system resources," says Navjot Virk"
How about getting it right the first time....
This is fucking bullshit (Score:2, Troll)
I use a Windows machine with 16GB and even when Windows claims much of it is free, it still chokes with a bunch of disk activity when I use little used functions even of applications I'm actively using. I conclude that Windows is paging even when it doesn't have to, and then having to reload those pages later. This is sloppy bullshit because they could copy those pages to disk and not actually reallocate until it's necessary.
Silver lining? (Score:2)
Maybe the RAM crunch will make optimizing resource utilization cool again?
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Let's hope so, at least with OSes.
Realistically speaking, there's really no reason to NOT improve the performance of your software, now - especially when selling your software depends on the cost of the hardware being cheap, as has always been the case for Microsoft. LLMs have made this kind of bughunt/performance optimization obscenely cheap.
There is no good reason for the OS itself to use 4+GB of memory and interfere with application operation. It's just laziness on the part of the developers.
More broadly
The Slowest Horse in a Race with the Slowest Horse (Score:2)
Let me know (Score:2)
Let me know when they can get a useable install down to 4GB, officially. The last time I used Windows 11, it was atrocious even on 32GB.
Sigh (Score:2)
Which means you could have done that all along - you just didn't give a shit. It was more important to you to turn my machines into walking adverts for your products, trying to push everything I own into your cloud, and jump on every fad imaginable, rather than make an OS that would actually allow me to use my machine.
Which is why I don't have any Microsoft OS at home any more.
Oh, and I never had less than 64GB in a Windows machine in the last 8 or so years. But it was still a shitshow.
This sudden "lets m
Odd (Score:2)
Today On Turd Polishing– (Score:2)
[exploding cement truck guy explains that yes, you can polish a turd but why would you?]
Summary buried the Bluetooth bump (Score:1)