It's the web browser that is the killer for old computers. The damned web browsers will sit there and demand 600 MB of RAM just idling. Wanna watch TH-cam? Forget it. From a software engineering standpoint, the web browser is the most kludgy wreck of rolling design demands and scope creep ever. The web browser has even made the "Just install Linux on old computers" mantra not ring so true unless you are willing to use something like Links2, w3m, or Midori.
They got puffin browser, which can run on the slowest of PC's well and use minimal RAM. I once got it running on an Atom with 10 and 1GB of RAM and it ran just fine.
PixelOutlaw True. Used a browser to watch TH-cam videos on an old laptop one time, it'd just freeze the system. Though recent VLC releases picked up the slack and it manages YT 720p reasonably well.
Windows XP SP1 can actually boot and run in as little as 48 MB of RAM, at least with the Classic theme and all visual frills disabled. However, SP2 was a major overhaul with a new kernel and lots of new features, so it takes up more RAM.
Yeah, I had an older (even at the time) Pentium MMX-266 laptop with only 64 MB of RAM (it used custom RAM modules that were insanely expensive,) and upgraded it to Windows XP. It ran pre-SP2 just fine. Even ran Office on it with some gnarly Excel spreadsheets. Admittedly, I had a much more powerful desktop, so it wasn't my "primary" machine, but I did use it daily.
Vista’s requirements is so far for XP But in some case 32 mb of ram for XP still give it bsod Overall XP is still in good condition for low ram computers
Btw, the reason windows 10 uses so much ram in the 2gb case is that it always caches the harddisk. This is a good thing. So it's really easy for windows to just not do that in the case of lower ram size.
Only because it boots with less memory it doesn't mean that the system is more usable on old computers. I have an old notebook with 1GB of ram and single core, I tried Windows 10 on and it was very slow, without drivers. I couldn't even connect to internet, because it said that there weren't available resources. On windows 8.1, it worked well, but I didn't find video drivers. On windows 7, the system worked well and the drivers worked, but most programs like browser were slow. Windows Vista, that was its original OS, was very slow and everything made it crash (I didn't test reinstalling, it was with a lot of programs). Windows XP was the fastest OS that I tested, and it worked very well. Linux debian with LXQT also worked well.
Some of your blue screens may have been caused by the system trying to resume from hybrid shutdown mode. When you click "shut down" in 8 and newer, it goes into that pseudo-hibernated state. It might be worth a try with that feature turned off.
I had this and it f***ed up my Linux, because Windows had the whole filesystem table still in this memory snapshot. Well done, MS! (so first thing I'm gonna disable if installing it in the future)
Browningate I don't know, but I remember that, if you try to do the Windows Experience Index test in Windows 7 inside a VM, it'll display a message saying that it cannot run on a VM (even if VMware Tools or VM Additions are not installed)
Browningate Usually, the VMware or other Hypervisor gives away that information (see bit.ly/2M2ARSq for example). Windows COULD detect the virtualized CPU ring and change its behaviour.
Don't base what you guess Windows RAM needs are on what OEMs sell machines installed with. That was the whole problem Vista had back when it was new - OEMs would sell machines with 1GB of RAM preinstalled, Windows Vista would be using 90% of that just existing, so as soon as you started much of anything up you were into virtual RAM and the whole system started grinding. That I'm convinced is a lot of what got Vista the reputation it had. If you looked at Vista later in its life, like well into when Windows 7 was the standard, it was fine. I know a few people who used Vista right till the bitter end, and usually it was because their machines were way more powerful than those early Vista machines, and they had enough resources to run it well. In that situation, it really wasn't all that different to use than 7 was.
Vista suffered I'd say mostly because 3 problems. 1) Machines that had no business running Vista, running it. - Lack of RAM was a big reason, but not the only reason. I saw a lot of PCs that could barely run Windows XP trying to run Vista, like those Netbooks with the Intel Atom processors that were popular for a years. 2) Bad/Early drivers. - Even machines technically fully capable of running Vista had issues with some bad drivers. I remember doing tests in 2013 with some early, but capable Vista Machines that still had the drivers they shipped with, and being surprised by some of the difference it made in games once I installed the latest versions. 3) Software incompatibility. - There was a lot of software, that just didn't work with Vista. Windows7 in it's first year had a similar issue, but by then there was people already working on Vista+ compatible software. What happened with Vista could easily be described as a case of 'The second mouse gets the cheese.' All of these problems were pretty much fixed right before Win8 came out. Drivers had enough time to mature, and hardware was up to spec, plenty of software was written for Post XP OSs, but by then it was too late for Vista.
Those results were pretty much exactly what I expected. It's well known that Microsoft have been doing their best to optimise RAM usage since vista came out which is exactly what we're seeing here.
My schools uses windows xp machines they have about 48 mb of ram microsoft word runs pretty bad on it. You can get about 10 fps low graphics in cool math games
@@chonkshake1237 my previous school had windows xp with 1 gig of ram and they ran fine but lagged on powerpoint, there was also a ups(uninteruptable power supply) but only the first two computers would stay on during a power outage, they didnt even have internet so i couldn't play cool math games
optimally but most laptops only have 1 HDD slot soooo storage is more important there 99% of the time not booting fast or chucking the laptop around the room while it is running.
That's like saying the other versions might of won if they'd been smaller. But they weren't and they didn't. Window 10 required less memory than the others. Full stop.
Interesting series of tests! Thanks for doing that. I have drawn a different conclusion than you did from your testing. While it is true that the absolute minimum amount of RAM required to boot is lower in Windows 10, if more RAM is available, Windows 10 is more aggressive in allocating it for its purposes. It's not a matter of Windows 10 being more efficient but about judiciously differentiating what is required to boot and what can be deferred (if the RAM is available). The focus of these tests were about RAM, but CPU usage also comes into play. I'd be very interested to see a follow-up video that compares Windows 7, 8, and 10 with regard to RAM, CPU usage, and storage footprint of the OS. Thanks again! definitely thumbs-up worthy. :)
Fun fact: Windows 95 could theoretically run on a modern system with no RAM at all. It needs 8MB, which means it could fit entirely in CPU cache. I doubt it (or any BIOS) would be willing to actually boot that way though.
@@bmw_fantopdrives5501 Probably not, since Windows 95 had never heard of cache sizes in processors that big at that time, let alone that if there were processors with stages (L1, L2, L3) of cache like we have today (I am not completely sure if there were processors like that in those days, or if it simply was a case that even though small, they might have had it but it simply was not a necessity to state it's size since everything developed probably fitted in really well). That said, I never fail to be amazed about the creativity, intelligence and level of reverse engineering some people have to actually recode pieces of an OS to actually try and simulate that kind of RAM-less state of a system, virtual or not.
i've actually had windows xp boot on 32mb of ram before, and 64mb used to be the minimum spec on the box. the main thing is service pack 3 is a lot more resource intensive than service pack 2 and before were...
I wonder how the same test would fare for Windows 98 and 95. 98's recommended minimum is 16 MB, and 95's is 4 MB. I wonder if you could even take 95 down to the kilobytes! Maybe 3.1 could do it
Remember, physical devices like video cards or anything else take up memory space. If this were not a VM, much of that would be used by system HW, thus requiring more RAM to even boot up. This is good, because you ARe keeping it fair, but this is the best example of "real world results will vary" :)
Gregory Pappas Video Cards do not take up memory space. In fact, they give shared memory to the CPU, increasing responsiveness due to faster memory speed. iGPU’s such as Intel’s use shared memory, and dynamically allocate VRAM depending on DRAM size.
I did the opposite and recently upgraded my computer to the maximum of 32GB for Windows 10. I was worried I wouldn't be able to use it all, but now that I've stopped trying to aggressively conserve memory all the time like I did back when I only had 8GB, I'm seeing just how easy it is to use 16-22GB without even really trying, just by opening several browser tabs, a bunch of Microsoft Office apps, maybe a few GIMP sessions, Groove music player, and perhaps Skype. The vast majority of the time, the RAM usage sits right at 50%, somehow using 16GB, but often spiking to 22GB. I've definitely seen it hit 30GB, but not often. I don't really regret my purchase. Paging was markedly slower. People still say no one needs more than 16GB, but I think they mean for gaming, and underestimate how bloated modern web pages are these days. Try having a Facebook tab, a TH-cam tab, a LinkedIn tab, a Twitter tab, and maybe a couple of news articles on a junky site full of advertisements open all at once, and you'll be shocked how fast that RAM gets gobbled up.
like how tho? XP isn't supported anymore, there is no modern browser for it so you cant access most websites. You can't play modern games on it because of directX. Majority of programs require DLL files that dont exist on XP. I am not bashing or anything i would actually like to know how you do it
I'm not using my XP machine for internet browsing or modern gaming. I'm just using it to type documents, record rca signals with a tv tuner card, and run old software that wont run on my main windows 10 machine. I just really like the way Windows XP was designed and doesn't come with so much bloat.
Leonartist actually,i have some old pcs(3 or 4) which cannot run anything than xp(practically,it can,but drivers doesn't exists). sometimes,i turn on some pcs due to nostalgia
Λ Ӿ Ξ Λ И D Y 21 Im using Windows XP too! I have the POSready updates on, so i get security updates til' 2019. I use Mozilla Firefox 52 ESR, which is still getting security updates, and opens every website Flawlessly. My anti-virus software is avast, and it still works with XP. And i dont play games on that computer at all. (But you can install a hack to play DirectX 10 games on XP)
POSReady 2009 security updates don't address bugs in the additional features XP has. They aren't the same systems, and both of them are architecturally deficient by today's standards regarding security.
Thanks for this comparison - I've found 10 to run quite well on hardware that used to run 7, and your results accurately display that plus confirm how bad Vista is against those that came before and after it!
It's surprising because at some point you assume people aren't stupid enough to waste away half their day waiting on memory swapping, every day, just to save $10 on memory. Really, get off youtube and use the time to mow someone's lawn for that $20 if they're that hard up for memory. It's extremely idiotic to run a modern OS on crippled old hardware. The opposite is where you want to be, run the oldest OS that does what you need in order to have the most memory free to do that.
The real question. What is the minimum amount of RAM Windows can boot with while the page file is deactivated? This will show a truly accurate number because the way you are doing it here Windows is swapping it's own processes out on boot. It is essentially giving it the extra RAM it needs in a slower form. If I recall correctly for instance Windows 95 was able to boot on 16MB of RAM with no page file active. What will it take to boot modern Windows with no swap? IDK I've been using Linux for 20 years exclusively. 2021 update vid?
You're sort of missing the point though. What people should be asking is why Windows spends half it's time paging to disk, even when it isn't necessary? On top of that, you should be asking why any basic OS 'requires' a GHz processor just to run itself at a decent speed? What exactly is it using all those cycles on? What is the actual job of the OS? Windows 11 wants a DUAL core processor just to install!
Were you successful? Our old PC drove us absolutely crazy with minute long swapping and unbearably slow speed (Win10 4GB)... until we upgraded from 4GBs of RAM to 12GB. Strange thing same OS works flawlessly in a VirtualBox with 4Gigs of RAM.
I've got an old socket 754 Athlon 64 with 1.25gb of DDR memory and a slow hard drive, I tried throwing Win 10 32 bit on it just to see what it could do. Oh it installed just fine, but browsing the web with Chrome was an exercise in futility. The system keot hammering the hard drive almost constantly and updates took literally hours to install. I nuked the drive and threw Win 7 on it. It's actually quite usable in this configuration
Yeah, real hardware vs VM running on a high powered machine is not a real comparison in terms of usability, as the VM settings are merely what's reported to the OS running there. For all practical purposes, his pagefile was running at RAM speed or greater. I think he was just trying to find the hard limit where you couldn't even boot, not imply anything about actual usability on old hardware. The conclusion being Win 10 doesn't *require* are much physical RAM to boot, but that's really all we can tell from this kind of test. In practice, Win 10 is not going to run well on most legacy hardware without some tricks (like SSD upgrades and overclocking etc.). I'd rather see a comparison of Win XP/7/8/10 on real hardware with a reasonable amount of RAM.
This is most likely a combination of two things: 1) Too much oem crapware bloat that needed uninstalled. 2) HDD instead of SSD. Laptop HDD are very slow compared to the cheapest of $18 SSDs.
Probably you have a hdd, windows 10 really don't like hdd. More it's not windows that don't like 4 gb of ram is the programs that you use. 3 or 4 internet tabs plus a document open on office will work good on 4gb but more that that will be necessary virtual memory and it will have a big drop in performance (but not soo big with a ssd)
I love love LOVE Windows 7! I've been using it since day one and I'm STILL not compelled to upgrade. Windows 10 rubs me the wrong way. I would perhaps like it more if I could skin it to look and behave exactly as Windows 7 does. I'm also not a huge fan the the always on connectivity to Microsoft. As for this episode, I ended up enjoying it. The virtual machine was a nice touch and I'm sure it saved you a TON of extra work than if you'd tried doing this on actual hardware.
I used to love Windows 7, but then I began to notice that there are things that just can't be done on 7 that work well on 10. I installed Classic Shell and a tool to disable the Ribbon in Explorer. I don't hate it so much now.
Ya, the install was for something bigger, and XP has the worst possible time trimming its load of the ram available shrinks or lowers after install. Yes, windows 8, and 8.1 are separate OS's and 8.1 is more then a service pack.
Maybe you're trying the original 2001 version with no Service Packs? That's nearly as vintage as Win 95 or 98. You can run nearly nothing released over the last decade on that.
Windows 10 is made by design to run on 512 megs of RAM. That was for IOT devices (Raspberry PI), phones, embedded systems (ATMs and kiosks), and game systems(Xbox One and another system.) It will run at 256 megs. It just turn off ANY special rendering feature like scrolling. This because you may have an app you want keep in memory with affecting performance. Side Note: The 'other game system' was going to be the Dreamcast 2. A bunch or developer were petitioning Sega to let them release an updated system. They wanted to use Window 7, 8, and eventually 10's version. Windows CE was used in the original Dreamcast as the boot loader and file manager. A very very few developers made games for Windows CE on the Dreamcast 1. Sega mostly shut down the project with cease and desist orders. What was left of the team was talking about making their own system and releasing it under another name. Last I heard the project was considered dead. Here the kicker: The Dreamcast 2 was pretty much was released. It was called the Xbox. Just stay with me for a moment. The Xbox had 4 controller ports, almost identical controllers and a VMU memory card system like Dreamcast. Also Sega had a habit of basing their next generation home systems on the current generation arcade board. Sega generally just reduces the RAM and removes any custom features like communication modules for rumble seats, link cables, and flashing lights. The Sega Chihiro arcade system, what the Dreamcast 2 would have been based on, is almost identical to the Xbox. The main difference between the Chihiro arcade system and Xbox is that Xbox has less RAM. Even the chip placement and wiring are almost identical. A programmer has dumped and decrypted the Chihiro ROMs of three Sega arcade systems (Ghost Squad, Outrun 2 SP, and Virtua Cop 3) and got them to run on an Xbox with very minor memory mapping changes. Here is a more detailed video about this: th-cam.com/video/lWGiHgTdLBc/w-d-xo.html
I think you should have disabled virtual memory on all of those OSs. Also, could you do that on Mac OS? It may be one of those things that can't be directly compared, but still... I'd like to know.
No one with a sane mind will run an OS with disabled paging/virtual memory because the moment the OS reaches the upper limit of the installed RAM it just will straight up crash, even if it is just a spike in RAM usage.
It is valid in a consumer grade OS? How much is "plenty" and how do you guarantee that you won't run over the address range of your available RAM? How much is OK to overpay for RAM when you need just a tad more occasionally? No, it is not valid to run a system that way and doesn't make sense to give up the stability of your system for no good reason.
Especially valid in a consumer grade OS, as in business use you would want to prevent an out of memory scenario even if unlikely. Two valid scenarios come to mind but there are bound to be others. One is using a cheap SSD which you don't want to burden with swapping (early Vista was especially bad at swapping but even later versions like to swap a bit more than necessary), second is just for the speed. Also, 'a tad more RAM' usage isn't usually much more that the amount of RAM I would recommend anyway.
I guess our opinions differ about that topic. You still didn't answer how you guarantee that you never need paging as in never run out of RAM. Just like with professional use I as a customer prefer stability over performance. I could agree that aggressive paging is not needed but turning it completely off is non-sense to me.
do you know that windows 10 needs more ram than windows 7 because windows 7 doesn't have that automatic swap file system under windows 7 u have to enable it because it was designed to run on harddrives and also doesn't alocate its size automaticly
ik you said it in the end but when u use windows 10 7 xp with 64 bit and 8 gig of ram windows 10 with the clean install takes up 4 gigs windows 7 1.5gb and windows xp 1gb so idk if they got efficient i use linux anyways if i can
Colin, honestly, calling that a Win10 fresh with no apps running is performing well with just 768 MB of RAM is a little misleading. Try opening literally anything else and you'll be going pretty slow. Also, at 7:07 you fail to point out that Windows is using virtual RAM. You are using almost 800 MB from the 2800 MB of virtual RAM. You address it latter, but imo you should have at least say something about it.
The difference in their operating "minimums" was 28MB. That's so insignificant considering that nothing short of experimentation would use those low memory levels. If you factor in what actually helps responsiveness, the installation medium matters much more. I have BitLocker encrypted Windows 8.1 systems that boot as fast as any Windows 10 computer (short of NVMe raid systems) can because of their SSDs.
the backend is optimized on win10 but the problem is all the userspace intrusions, i.e. bloatware, sudden random updates without user consent, auto-reinstallation of software you already uninstalled, the reset of all user privacy preferences upon big updates, etc.
For those of the more retro persuasion, here's a round-up of "RAM sweet spots" for old versions of Windows: (NOTE: These are NOT _minimum_ requirements, just my observed "no longer disk thrashing when using some apps" RAM levels) 95 liked to have at least 24MB. 98/SE preferred to have about 32-48MB. NT4 liked to have at least 64MB. 2K really needed 128MB, (brief fanboy moment: I clung to this pleasingly slimline and reliable OS for grim death until pretty much being forced to XP in the mid 00s). XP SP1 was okay with half a gig, but by SP2 really needed 768MB to be comfortable. Vista needed 128GB.... at least that's how it felt. :D
Windows 95 runs very comfortably (for me at least, maybe i just don't have as much junk on as others) on 8MB ram. It's also the RTM version, so no service packs that might bog down the system
Are we sure that the hypervisor isn't causing any problems. I know VMware has problems with extremely low amounts of ram, with some hilarious glitches below 32mb.
Usually I noticed that windows usually uses either 25%-50% of your ram depending on how mutch ram you have, for example if you have 1-2 gigs of ram ram usage is usually 50% and if your using 4 or more gigabytes of ram its usually 25% usage
Interesting results. Though I gotta comment on those mentioned W10 insults: I really don't think anyone hating on and advising people to avoid W10 really care about its "efficiency", or even its looks (though its UI design is terrible). It really has more to do with the modern business practices of Microshit itself, and how you're practically selling your soul and computer to them, "signing up for a service" rather than installing a software. And with all those OBLIGATORY updates literally breaking and bricking people's machines, or at least destroying compatibility with quite recent, mainstream applications, there's a lot of issues with W10. So many of such caliber, that I'm literally, no joke, never buying or using another MS product, if they do not make a complete 180-degree turn in the future, and back pedal a mile.
I have windows 7 running on a 2.2GHz Pentium 4 from around 2003, with 512MB of RAM and a 20GB IDE HDD to run my Dad's "MagicJack" phone service. It's so strange seeing a fairly modern OS on an old machine with such a noisy hard drive. To be fair I have aero and everything else imaginable turned off, and I think the system has a 128MB dedicated nVidia Quadro AGP GPU.
Dead Reckon you didn't have windows 7 ultimate,right? because i tested all windows 7 editions on 256 mb ram(real pc) and only the ultimate edition was very slow,unlike the others,which run smoothly
Here is the thing: Microsoft moved Windows Phone to Windows NT kernel instead of Windows CE kernel after Windows Phone 7. That forced Windows NT to run on smaller memories found on phones, and in turn having those memory-saving technologies trickle over to the desktop side of things. While Windows Phone died, we do get the legacy of a slimmer NT kernel that is shared by desktop and console versions of Windows.
You missed the whole point of the video then. It's been mentioned countless times along the video that the point in this test was how much RAM was necessary to barely have the OS to boot.
Started Programming in Binary on TI-99 4/a with 16K 1983. Was quite fine with stable Windows 2000 Professional using 98MB ram out of 256MB Dell Inspiron, 24 years ago.
This interesting phenomenon is because Windows 10 is way ahead in managing resources compared to Vista, 7 or 8. There are so many things like compression and all going around in Windows 10. If you had used any power shell scripts to clean all the blot that come with Windows 10, I am sure that it will work at memory even less. P.S. It is also interesting to note that Windows 10 may function on low ram due to above reasons, but will not install well or fast with low ram. I am sure 32 bit don't install at or below 512 MB and 64 bit below 1 gig. I tested with a 64 bit install on 1 gig of ram. Was able to get up to the part were we select language and all. Then it was stuck at just a moment.
Just because Windows 10 starts up with 140MB that doesn't mean it isn't a bloated mess. When svchost, OneDrive, Windows Defender and the indexing service start to utilize all of your CPU and memory all at once, it's a nightmare. Not to mention that even on x64 machines, Windows 7 is happy with only 1GB of RAM even if you have 4GB, while Windows 10 (additionally to the automatically starting nightmare party with the things I mentioned before) uses about 2.5GB on cold boot. In rare cases goes down to 1.5-1.6, but those are luckier times. 2.5 seems the base. This synthetic test is nothing compared to how problematic is the OS in real life scenarios. Also, nowadays, Patch Tuesday updates make your system un-bootable or on a freshly installed Windows, the drivers that are automatically pulled down from Microsoft's server might also brick everything. Sometimes a reboot solves it, but you can easily get BSOD from them. And of course, on Windows Pro it's easily manageable, but those with Windows Home (Edition) can't even turn off Windows Defender, because the switch does nothing. First it's fine, until the OS decides that it wants that being turned on (if not other way, after an update that happens instantly). Group Policy should be default on Windows Home, not only for Pro users, because there are lots of things that can't be configured without that Windows component. In Windows 8.1 and earlier we had way more control even in Windows Home, then Microsoft thought that if you want more, then you should pay more. Well, no thanks! So, this was a great experiment, but it really isn't about what's the lowest limit for booting Windows.
That's still bloated when you compare it to older OSs like Windows 98 or Mac OS 9 or Mac OS X panther and earlier. I've messed with all those older OSs and they are still VERY capable of doing modern tasks.
"capable of doing modern tasks"... Well, no. Editing a Word document in windows 98 that can be readable on a more modern computer with more modern software, using compatibility options, etc., is stretching the definition of "capable of doing modern tasks" too much.
The main reason people don't like Windows 10 is because of the lack of control and the fact that Windows 10 is full of bloatware apps (preinstalled/self installing junk)
I'm using Win10 1903 x64 and it's using 15 gigs of my 32 gigs of RAM when idle. As I learnt from another video, it doesn't actually "use" it, it's just reserving it to make it available much quicker than without the reserving thing. I'm a software engineer and that makes a lot of sense to me. In general, I think, Windows 10 will always use/reserve (at least) around half of what you have, most of the time. Edit: I disabled the virtual memory. Don't know if that's a factor.
@@KamiKitsuneVA Yeah there are some older lightweight distros that run surprisingly well on very old hardware. Even a fork of Debian Server (which is pretty up-to-date and not really meant as a "lighweight" distro) recommends 96MiB RAM minimum, although granted it doesn't have a desktop.
When I install fresh copy of Windows 10 on my PC (with 16GB RAM), on startup Windows 10 uses 2GB of RAM. After I install all programs, then when I turn on PC, 3GB of RAM is used.
minimum if you want to actual do something with the computer is 4gb firefox and word watch movies , if you want to use photoshop with images bigger than 12mp 8gb , 16 for premier pro , and 32 for after effects , also try windows 10 on old netbook with 1gb it open but was unusable , with w7 was working well at 1gb , but install 2 and works fine with w7
i think in win 10 4gb is usable for non gaming or heavy multitasking tasks, but usually kinda "pushing it", really 8gb would be alot safer than that, and still good enough for gaming in alot of cases (but 16gb is the sweet spot for gaming). don't remember if win7 was different. Ofc light weight linux distros are kind of king when ikt comes to low-ram pcs.
Remember many stripped down hardware systems use a stripped down Windows version too. There is a dev that made Mini Windows 10 and 11 for older hardware/low memory situations.
I'd love to know how to "bias" Windows 10 (and other versions) so that it uses little or no "virtual memory" before physical RAM is nearly exhausted. The memory management, even in Windows 10 is arbitrarily and needlessly using swap space too soon.
This is just a fallacy. Maybe it uses less ram as a minimum requirement, but 99% of people wouldn't be limited to physically starting the machine. What will make a bigger difference is CPU load, available storage and the amount of background services running.
Black Friday deal like over a year ago. For $90 I got RCA netbook with 2GB of RAM with 4 core Adom CPU and I play full HD TH-cam videos on it all the time.
Here on Manjaro KDE 2.7 GB in total with the browser open for hours and many tabs open, at least 2 GB is being used for the browser. The great thing is that the memory of the browser barely rises, it easily stays under 4 GB in total for the browser and the system while I am a heavy browser user and on Windows 8 GB certainly is not enough for me. One of the reasons why I like to use LInux, I boot up Windows to game and to run roughly 2 other programs, browsing and multimedia I use with Linux.
Very insightful video. Amazing to see just how much RAM Windows can still work with. While I personally won’t have that issue as I have my old motherboard maxed out with 32GB of DDR3 RAM, it’s nice to know that my smallest stick of RAM I still have, 4GB of DDR3, will still allow Windows to work even if some of my most modern games will be laggy as anything. The funniest thing of this video though: Windows be like “Imma gonna update and you can’t stop me”. 😂
The thing that saved Microsoft after Vista was they really tightened up resource management and made the OS more efficient. Then browser companies and web developers decided only phones get web and browser optimization now. On the desktop that is dead. It is ludicrous when you can eat up almost 3 GBs of RAM with just two tabs open. That is insane. Makes me feel like we are back in the 90s when tabbed browsing just started and more then two tabs would crash your system.
IIRC Windows XP's RAM requirements are 64mb mínimum (and a that amount you can't disable the pagefile) and 128Mb recommended. Compared tto the 512Mb minimum / 1Gb recommended for Vista it is a huge gap. Also, WinHistory did a XP minimal requirement test where they booted the OS with the bare mínimum hardware to see how low it could go (Spoiler: 18Mb for Ram and an 8Mhz CPU where the lowest)
idk if people noticed this but the pagefile size on windows 7 was less than half the size of the one on 10, this test should be done with a disabled pagefile
he is saying gig of ram, if you are making a video it would pretty annouying to keep saying a gigabyte of ram all the time so he used a commonly understood contraction
This video got me started with my Windows XP SP3 Virtual machine, got it to boot with 32MB of RAM in safe mode with networking and Opera browser can still load pages, going to keep going lower though. UPDATE: 28MB working but now it's starting to feel slow, offline use seems alright but Opera browser is causing issues once it starts to load its UI.
The results are not too surprising, since Windows 10 ditched most of its legacy code for previous versions of Windows, and Internet Explorer. I knew from the beginning that Windows 10 was a less memory intensive OS. It was nice that you were able to prove the point.
If you're trying to play games I'd say 12 gb is the minimum. I had 8 for a while, but a couple of games (AAA titles) required more and crashed the program.
The less physical memory you have the more virtual memory it uses or is using. In your "tests" the less physical memory it had the more virtual (HDD) it used. This last part has a huge impact on the performance of the computer, some will even throttle back the CPU clock speed (Compaq V2000 does this on XP).
I have an idea, try something like this again but limit the amount of free hard drive space to about 500MB, so Windows doesn't have much space in the page file either.
My pc has a Celeron N2840 2.16GHz can TurboBoost at 2.56GHz, it came with 2gbs of ram and bought a 4gb stick for a couple of dollars, not a problem for Celeron processors, made a lot of different
I've tried all modern versions of windows on a old laptop with 2 GB of RAM. 8.1 by far ran circles around 7 and 10. Sat at around 512 MB RAM usage at idle.
Makes sense with how smaller/lower power computing devices have gotten more popular over the last decade that newer Windows versions would be optimized to work on less beefy hardware. Pretty neat though!
those blue screens are because of windows fast shutdown, you have to hold shift when you click shutdown to avoid that, or disable it completely in settings
We have a few workstations at work with 512GB of ram. I think at idle with nothing running they were showing something like 24GB or 32GB of ram in use. They also have an Intel 1.2TB PCIe SSD card in them. Windows seems to scale its ram usage to what it has available. If you really want to try some tight ram usage, try Server 2012R2 Hyper-V Core and Server 2016 Hyper-V core. Both are fully free OSes to download from Microsoft. They basically have almost no GUI. The login screen is a "command prompt window" box in all text. With so little running they may go even tighter on ram.
Despite what people say, win10 is a very well optimized OS, in terms of resource usage, especially considering MS designed its kernel to be able to run on a large array of devices, from IOT to servers. it definitely runs better on older hardware than windows 7 and 8.
I had an old Dell Optiplex GX1 Desktop with 64 MB of Ram and a 450 Mhz Pentium II CPU and was successfully able to boot Windows XP SP3 and run Office 2003 on there with no trouble. the original OS was Windows 98 SE
It's the web browser that is the killer for old computers. The damned web browsers will sit there and demand 600 MB of RAM just idling. Wanna watch TH-cam? Forget it. From a software engineering standpoint, the web browser is the most kludgy wreck of rolling design demands and scope creep ever. The web browser has even made the "Just install Linux on old computers" mantra not ring so true unless you are willing to use something like Links2, w3m, or Midori.
zunozap not working here , win 7 64
Firefox, 3 tabs, one youtube video, 1.7GB in use by it here.
They got puffin browser, which can run on the slowest of PC's well and use minimal RAM. I once got it running on an Atom with 10 and 1GB of RAM and it ran just fine.
PixelOutlaw True. Used a browser to watch TH-cam videos on an old laptop one time, it'd just freeze the system. Though recent VLC releases picked up the slack and it manages YT 720p reasonably well.
It's not even the browser, per se. It's modern website design requirements.
Windows XP SP1 can actually boot and run in as little as 48 MB of RAM, at least with the Classic theme and all visual frills disabled. However, SP2 was a major overhaul with a new kernel and lots of new features, so it takes up more RAM.
Yeah, I had an older (even at the time) Pentium MMX-266 laptop with only 64 MB of RAM (it used custom RAM modules that were insanely expensive,) and upgraded it to Windows XP. It ran pre-SP2 just fine. Even ran Office on it with some gnarly Excel spreadsheets. Admittedly, I had a much more powerful desktop, so it wasn't my "primary" machine, but I did use it daily.
Had windows 2000 sp4 running on a pentium 1 120 mhz with 32mb ram
That's not even a fair comparison.
Vista’s requirements is so far for XP
But in some case 32 mb of ram for XP still give it bsod
Overall XP is still in good condition for low ram computers
If I'm right,Microsoft actually documented the XP's min ram that can run is 64MB
Btw, the reason windows 10 uses so much ram in the 2gb case is that it always caches the harddisk. This is a good thing. So it's really easy for windows to just not do that in the case of lower ram size.
The cahce does not show up as used in task manager tough it's a seperate number.
Only because it boots with less memory it doesn't mean that the system is more usable on old computers.
I have an old notebook with 1GB of ram and single core, I tried Windows 10 on and it was very slow, without drivers. I couldn't even connect to internet, because it said that there weren't available resources.
On windows 8.1, it worked well, but I didn't find video drivers.
On windows 7, the system worked well and the drivers worked, but most programs like browser were slow.
Windows Vista, that was its original OS, was very slow and everything made it crash (I didn't test reinstalling, it was with a lot of programs).
Windows XP was the fastest OS that I tested, and it worked very well.
Linux debian with LXQT also worked well.
Some of your blue screens may have been caused by the system trying to resume from hybrid shutdown mode. When you click "shut down" in 8 and newer, it goes into that pseudo-hibernated state. It might be worth a try with that feature turned off.
I had this and it f***ed up my Linux, because Windows had the whole filesystem table still in this memory snapshot. Well done, MS! (so first thing I'm gonna disable if installing it in the future)
I think Windows disables Fast Boot when it detects that you've installed it on a VM...
@ahernandez
How could it know? Does the companion program (VMWare tools or its equivalent on your virtualization platform of choice) do this perhaps?
Browningate I don't know, but I remember that, if you try to do the Windows Experience Index test in Windows 7 inside a VM, it'll display a message saying that it cannot run on a VM (even if VMware Tools or VM Additions are not installed)
Browningate Usually, the VMware or other Hypervisor gives away that information (see bit.ly/2M2ARSq for example). Windows COULD detect the virtualized CPU ring and change its behaviour.
Don't base what you guess Windows RAM needs are on what OEMs sell machines installed with. That was the whole problem Vista had back when it was new - OEMs would sell machines with 1GB of RAM preinstalled, Windows Vista would be using 90% of that just existing, so as soon as you started much of anything up you were into virtual RAM and the whole system started grinding. That I'm convinced is a lot of what got Vista the reputation it had. If you looked at Vista later in its life, like well into when Windows 7 was the standard, it was fine. I know a few people who used Vista right till the bitter end, and usually it was because their machines were way more powerful than those early Vista machines, and they had enough resources to run it well. In that situation, it really wasn't all that different to use than 7 was.
Agreed. Vista was fine if you had the hardware to support it.
XP PCs with "Vista Capable" stickers on them shipped with 512MB :-O
Thats just awful.
Blake Crews yep
Vista suffered I'd say mostly because 3 problems.
1) Machines that had no business running Vista, running it. - Lack of RAM was a big reason, but not the only reason. I saw a lot of PCs that could barely run Windows XP trying to run Vista, like those Netbooks with the Intel Atom processors that were popular for a years.
2) Bad/Early drivers. - Even machines technically fully capable of running Vista had issues with some bad drivers. I remember doing tests in 2013 with some early, but capable Vista Machines that still had the drivers they shipped with, and being surprised by some of the difference it made in games once I installed the latest versions.
3) Software incompatibility. - There was a lot of software, that just didn't work with Vista. Windows7 in it's first year had a similar issue, but by then there was people already working on Vista+ compatible software.
What happened with Vista could easily be described as a case of 'The second mouse gets the cheese.'
All of these problems were pretty much fixed right before Win8 came out. Drivers had enough time to mature, and hardware was up to spec, plenty of software was written for Post XP OSs, but by then it was too late for Vista.
Google Chrome: "I'm about to end this man's whole career."
Those results were pretty much exactly what I expected. It's well known that Microsoft have been doing their best to optimise RAM usage since vista came out which is exactly what we're seeing here.
I don't think your Mac was even writing that pagefile to disk. The VM made so many changes in that area that macOS probably cached it in RAM.
512 mb on win10 runs better than the computers at my school
My schools uses windows xp machines they have about 48 mb of ram microsoft word runs pretty bad on it. You can get about 10 fps low graphics in cool math games
@@chonkshake1237 my previous school had windows xp with 1 gig of ram and they ran fine but lagged on powerpoint, there was also a ups(uninteruptable power supply) but only the first two computers would stay on during a power outage, they didnt even have internet so i couldn't play cool math games
Sad but true
@@dominikgothard3405 Im your dream, mind astray
my school computers have 8gb ram and an i3 processor
I love how everyone says Windows 10 is so bloated, but of the most recent OS's, it uses the least RAM, and can run on the least RAM.
Love how badly it aged with windows 11’s ludicrous requirements, too.
In my experience Windows 10 is a lot slower on a HDD than Windows 7.
Pasi123 This is because 10 is prioritized toward SSDs now. HDD are basically legacy now.
HDD is legacy you a nut or something storage is still an issue with SSDs 1TB is about 200$ on a SSD compared to 50$ for a standard HDD.
As a main disc HDD is legacy. It's perfectly fine as a second disc for stuff that doesn't need fast storage. Any os should always boot from a ssd.
optimally but most laptops only have 1 HDD slot soooo storage is more important there 99% of the time not booting fast or chucking the laptop around the room while it is running.
I don't find it all that much different. If you give it enough RAM it runs better than 7 from my experiences. Windows 10 surprised me.
Windows 10 can do 140Mb RAM, surpassing the other OSs, because it has memory compression. So in actually Windows 8 (at 168MB) might be the winner.
That's like saying the other versions might of won if they'd been smaller. But they weren't and they didn't. Window 10 required less memory than the others. Full stop.
@@another3997 You must be extra fun at parties. Full stop.
1gb is the requirement basically been the same since windows 7. 2gb minimum for actually doing anything like chrome.
Isn’t Vista the begging of the 6.x build and requiring 1GB of RAM?
Harry Tsang I’m not sure to be honest maybe.
Vista recommended a minimum of 512mb. 7 requirements were pretty much the same but bumped up ram to 1GB
When I installed Windows 7 Beta on a 512MB Pentium M laptop, it ran like a dream I was very surprised.
vista recommended minimum of 512mb only on home basic version. Other version like home premium business and ultimate require 1gb
Interesting series of tests! Thanks for doing that. I have drawn a different conclusion than you did from your testing. While it is true that the absolute minimum amount of RAM required to boot is lower in Windows 10, if more RAM is available, Windows 10 is more aggressive in allocating it for its purposes.
It's not a matter of Windows 10 being more efficient but about judiciously differentiating what is required to boot and what can be deferred (if the RAM is available).
The focus of these tests were about RAM, but CPU usage also comes into play. I'd be very interested to see a follow-up video that compares Windows 7, 8, and 10 with regard to RAM, CPU usage, and storage footprint of the OS. Thanks again! definitely thumbs-up worthy. :)
@Codemasteri thought windows can just page it's own garbage to let the other programs get their soace
Fun fact: Windows 95 could theoretically run on a modern system with no RAM at all. It needs 8MB, which means it could fit entirely in CPU cache.
I doubt it (or any BIOS) would be willing to actually boot that way though.
Someone tested that?
@@bmw_fantopdrives5501 Probably not, since Windows 95 had never heard of cache sizes in processors that big at that time, let alone that if there were processors with stages (L1, L2, L3) of cache like we have today (I am not completely sure if there were processors like that in those days, or if it simply was a case that even though small, they might have had it but it simply was not a necessity to state it's size since everything developed probably fitted in really well).
That said, I never fail to be amazed about the creativity, intelligence and level of reverse engineering some people have to actually recode pieces of an OS to actually try and simulate that kind of RAM-less state of a system, virtual or not.
@@Dutch3DMaster Processors had on board cache long before Windows 95 was dreamed of.
i've actually had windows xp boot on 32mb of ram before, and 64mb used to be the minimum spec on the box. the main thing is service pack 3 is a lot more resource intensive than service pack 2 and before were...
widnawz it's more like:
XP RTM, XP SP1 and XP SP1a: less resource hogging
XP SP2 and XP SP3: more resource hogging
in my experiences SP2 seems to be a lot lighter and snappier than SP1, and SP3 is significantly heavier
widnawz hmm interesting! have you tried RTM?
I still like using windows 2000 on my secondary dell rig
widnawz really? it takes 10 minutes for me to boot on 192mb
I wonder how the same test would fare for Windows 98 and 95. 98's recommended minimum is 16 MB, and 95's is 4 MB. I wonder if you could even take 95 down to the kilobytes! Maybe 3.1 could do it
Maybe
Remember, physical devices like video cards or anything else take up memory space. If this were not a VM, much of that would be used by system HW, thus requiring more RAM to even boot up. This is good, because you ARe keeping it fair, but this is the best example of "real world results will vary" :)
Gregory Pappas Video Cards do not take up memory space. In fact, they give shared memory to the CPU, increasing responsiveness due to faster memory speed. iGPU’s such as Intel’s use shared memory, and dynamically allocate VRAM depending on DRAM size.
I did the opposite and recently upgraded my computer to the maximum of 32GB for Windows 10. I was worried I wouldn't be able to use it all, but now that I've stopped trying to aggressively conserve memory all the time like I did back when I only had 8GB, I'm seeing just how easy it is to use 16-22GB without even really trying, just by opening several browser tabs, a bunch of Microsoft Office apps, maybe a few GIMP sessions, Groove music player, and perhaps Skype. The vast majority of the time, the RAM usage sits right at 50%, somehow using 16GB, but often spiking to 22GB. I've definitely seen it hit 30GB, but not often. I don't really regret my purchase. Paging was markedly slower. People still say no one needs more than 16GB, but I think they mean for gaming, and underestimate how bloated modern web pages are these days. Try having a Facebook tab, a TH-cam tab, a LinkedIn tab, a Twitter tab, and maybe a couple of news articles on a junky site full of advertisements open all at once, and you'll be shocked how fast that RAM gets gobbled up.
Still using XP in 2018
like how tho? XP isn't supported anymore, there is no modern browser for it so you cant access most websites. You can't play modern games on it because of directX. Majority of programs require DLL files that dont exist on XP. I am not bashing or anything i would actually like to know how you do it
I'm not using my XP machine for internet browsing or modern gaming. I'm just using it to type documents, record rca signals with a tv tuner card, and run old software that wont run on my main windows 10 machine. I just really like the way Windows XP was designed and doesn't come with so much bloat.
Leonartist actually,i have some old pcs(3 or 4) which cannot run anything than xp(practically,it can,but drivers doesn't exists). sometimes,i turn on some pcs due to nostalgia
Λ Ӿ Ξ Λ И D Y 21
Im using Windows XP too! I have the POSready updates on, so i get security updates til' 2019. I use Mozilla Firefox 52 ESR, which is still getting security updates, and opens every website Flawlessly. My anti-virus software is avast, and it still works with XP. And i dont play games on that computer at all. (But you can install a hack to play DirectX 10 games on XP)
POSReady 2009 security updates don't address bugs in the additional features XP has. They aren't the same systems, and both of them are architecturally deficient by today's standards regarding security.
Thanks for this comparison - I've found 10 to run quite well on hardware that used to run 7, and your results accurately display that plus confirm how bad Vista is against those that came before and after it!
Why do you find surprising that Windows 10 runs with 2GB of RAM? For x32 version MS recommends minimum of 1 GB.
It's because windows uses around 50% ram when you have a 4gb ram pc
It's surprising because at some point you assume people aren't stupid enough to waste away half their day waiting on memory swapping, every day, just to save $10 on memory. Really, get off youtube and use the time to mow someone's lawn for that $20 if they're that hard up for memory. It's extremely idiotic to run a modern OS on crippled old hardware. The opposite is where you want to be, run the oldest OS that does what you need in order to have the most memory free to do that.
64 bit needs 2gb ram minimum
I remember winning a bet aggainst a linux nerd that windows 10 can boot on 256MB RAM on real hardware.
Sweatest win of my life.
My old computer has 6 GB despite being an i5 2500K and my new computer being an i7 7700K has 16 GB.
The real question. What is the minimum amount of RAM Windows can boot with while the page file is deactivated? This will show a truly accurate number because the way you are doing it here Windows is swapping it's own processes out on boot. It is essentially giving it the extra RAM it needs in a slower form. If I recall correctly for instance Windows 95 was able to boot on 16MB of RAM with no page file active. What will it take to boot modern Windows with no swap? IDK I've been using Linux for 20 years exclusively. 2021 update vid?
Modern ssd or nvme is very fast and its can perform well in swap file. Try hdd for storage.
You're sort of missing the point though. What people should be asking is why Windows spends half it's time paging to disk, even when it isn't necessary? On top of that, you should be asking why any basic OS 'requires' a GHz processor just to run itself at a decent speed? What exactly is it using all those cycles on? What is the actual job of the OS? Windows 11 wants a DUAL core processor just to install!
It needs 512 to run, only to run, without paging. However, less than that = page file.
Is 4gb of ram enough for just windows 10 and Microsoft office (I need it for school work and I don’t have a lot to spend 😂) thanks
Yes it's enough you can do office and web browsing but only two or three tabs in google chrome
ali Thanks 😊
Were you successful? Our old PC drove us absolutely crazy with minute long swapping and unbearably slow speed (Win10 4GB)... until we upgraded from 4GBs of RAM to 12GB.
Strange thing same OS works flawlessly in a VirtualBox with 4Gigs of RAM.
Andy D. It’s working fine at the moment but it will need a upgrade in the future by the seems of it
Yes
I've got an old socket 754 Athlon 64 with 1.25gb of DDR memory and a slow hard drive, I tried throwing Win 10 32 bit on it just to see what it could do. Oh it installed just fine, but browsing the web with Chrome was an exercise in futility. The system keot hammering the hard drive almost constantly and updates took literally hours to install. I nuked the drive and threw Win 7 on it. It's actually quite usable in this configuration
What? My previous laptop was struggling with 4gb ddr3 on windows 10 home
Yeah, real hardware vs VM running on a high powered machine is not a real comparison in terms of usability, as the VM settings are merely what's reported to the OS running there. For all practical purposes, his pagefile was running at RAM speed or greater. I think he was just trying to find the hard limit where you couldn't even boot, not imply anything about actual usability on old hardware. The conclusion being Win 10 doesn't *require* are much physical RAM to boot, but that's really all we can tell from this kind of test. In practice, Win 10 is not going to run well on most legacy hardware without some tricks (like SSD upgrades and overclocking etc.). I'd rather see a comparison of Win XP/7/8/10 on real hardware with a reasonable amount of RAM.
This is most likely a combination of two things:
1) Too much oem crapware bloat that needed uninstalled.
2) HDD instead of SSD. Laptop HDD are very slow compared to the cheapest of $18 SSDs.
Yeah I would recommend at least 8gb of ram on Windows 10
Probably you have a hdd, windows 10 really don't like hdd. More it's not windows that don't like 4 gb of ram is the programs that you use. 3 or 4 internet tabs plus a document open on office will work good on 4gb but more that that will be necessary virtual memory and it will have a big drop in performance (but not soo big with a ssd)
I tried on i5 3320m with HDD and i tried 512 mb of ram . It took 3,5 hours to get into task manager
I love love LOVE Windows 7! I've been using it since day one and I'm STILL not compelled to upgrade. Windows 10 rubs me the wrong way. I would perhaps like it more if I could skin it to look and behave exactly as Windows 7 does. I'm also not a huge fan the the always on connectivity to Microsoft. As for this episode, I ended up enjoying it. The virtual machine was a nice touch and I'm sure it saved you a TON of extra work than if you'd tried doing this on actual hardware.
Ryan Schaffer Install Classic Start.
Yeah, I loved windows 7 up to the time I tried 8.1...
I used to love Windows 7, but then I began to notice that there are things that just can't be done on 7 that work well on 10. I installed Classic Shell and a tool to disable the Ribbon in Explorer. I don't hate it so much now.
hmm, 96MB for XP? that's not right at all. it can install on 64MB, and once installed it can run all the way down to 18MB... something is wrong here
he did say he installed All of the security updates.. yet win 8 isnt 8.1 hmmmm.
Ya, the install was for something bigger, and XP has the worst possible time trimming its load of the ram available shrinks or lowers after install.
Yes, windows 8, and 8.1 are separate OS's and 8.1 is more then a service pack.
Kerns Noel ah yeah makes sense
Win 8.1 is basically Win 9 in all but name.
Maybe you're trying the original 2001 version with no Service Packs? That's nearly as vintage as Win 95 or 98. You can run nearly nothing released over the last decade on that.
Windows 10 is made by design to run on 512 megs of RAM. That was for IOT devices (Raspberry PI), phones, embedded systems (ATMs and kiosks), and game systems(Xbox One and another system.) It will run at 256 megs. It just turn off ANY special rendering feature like scrolling. This because you may have an app you want keep in memory with affecting performance.
Side Note: The 'other game system' was going to be the Dreamcast 2. A bunch or developer were petitioning Sega to let them release an updated system. They wanted to use Window 7, 8, and eventually 10's version. Windows CE was used in the original Dreamcast as the boot loader and file manager. A very very few developers made games for Windows CE on the Dreamcast 1. Sega mostly shut down the project with cease and desist orders. What was left of the team was talking about making their own system and releasing it under another name. Last I heard the project was considered dead.
Here the kicker: The Dreamcast 2 was pretty much was released. It was called the Xbox. Just stay with me for a moment. The Xbox had 4 controller ports, almost identical controllers and a VMU memory card system like Dreamcast. Also Sega had a habit of basing their next generation home systems on the current generation arcade board. Sega generally just reduces the RAM and removes any custom features like communication modules for rumble seats, link cables, and flashing lights.
The Sega Chihiro arcade system, what the Dreamcast 2 would have been based on, is almost identical to the Xbox. The main difference between the Chihiro arcade system and Xbox is that Xbox has less RAM. Even the chip placement and wiring are almost identical. A programmer has dumped and decrypted the Chihiro ROMs of three Sega arcade systems (Ghost Squad, Outrun 2 SP, and Virtua Cop 3) and got them to run on an Xbox with very minor memory mapping changes. Here is a more detailed video about this: th-cam.com/video/lWGiHgTdLBc/w-d-xo.html
I think you should have disabled virtual memory on all of those OSs.
Also, could you do that on Mac OS? It may be one of those things that can't be directly compared, but still... I'd like to know.
No one with a sane mind will run an OS with disabled paging/virtual memory because the moment the OS reaches the upper limit of the installed RAM it just will straight up crash, even if it is just a spike in RAM usage.
Actually it is a valid way to run a system. Just use plenty of RAM.
It is valid in a consumer grade OS? How much is "plenty" and how do you guarantee that you won't run over the address range of your available RAM? How much is OK to overpay for RAM when you need just a tad more occasionally? No, it is not valid to run a system that way and doesn't make sense to give up the stability of your system for no good reason.
Especially valid in a consumer grade OS, as in business use you would want to prevent an out of memory scenario even if unlikely. Two valid scenarios come to mind but there are bound to be others. One is using a cheap SSD which you don't want to burden with swapping (early Vista was especially bad at swapping but even later versions like to swap a bit more than necessary), second is just for the speed. Also, 'a tad more RAM' usage isn't usually much more that the amount of RAM I would recommend anyway.
I guess our opinions differ about that topic. You still didn't answer how you guarantee that you never need paging as in never run out of RAM. Just like with professional use I as a customer prefer stability over performance. I could agree that aggressive paging is not needed but turning it completely off is non-sense to me.
do you know that windows 10 needs more ram than windows 7 because windows 7 doesn't have that automatic swap file system under windows 7 u have to enable it because it was designed to run on harddrives and also doesn't alocate its size automaticly
ik you said it in the end but when u use windows 10 7 xp with 64 bit and 8 gig of ram windows 10 with the clean install takes up 4 gigs windows 7 1.5gb and windows xp 1gb so idk if they got efficient i use linux anyways if i can
What was your video memory set at? Lowering the video memory may allow you to lower the overall system memory. Awesome video I love it.
Colin, honestly, calling that a Win10 fresh with no apps running is performing well with just 768 MB of RAM is a little misleading. Try opening literally anything else and you'll be going pretty slow.
Also, at 7:07 you fail to point out that Windows is using virtual RAM. You are using almost 800 MB from the 2800 MB of virtual RAM. You address it latter, but imo you should have at least say something about it.
I would hardly call that a win for Windows 10. It just means that it loads its memory manager before the others.
so it's a bad thing that Win10 adapts to amount of memory present since the begining?
It isn't bad, just pointless. It says nothing about how much RAM the system needs/uses in practice.
The difference in their operating "minimums" was 28MB. That's so insignificant considering that nothing short of experimentation would use those low memory levels. If you factor in what actually helps responsiveness, the installation medium matters much more. I have BitLocker encrypted Windows 8.1 systems that boot as fast as any Windows 10 computer (short of NVMe raid systems) can because of their SSDs.
the backend is optimized on win10 but the problem is all the userspace intrusions, i.e. bloatware, sudden random updates without user consent, auto-reinstallation of software you already uninstalled, the reset of all user privacy preferences upon big updates, etc.
For those of the more retro persuasion, here's a round-up of "RAM sweet spots" for old versions of Windows: (NOTE: These are NOT _minimum_ requirements, just my observed "no longer disk thrashing when using some apps" RAM levels)
95 liked to have at least 24MB. 98/SE preferred to have about 32-48MB. NT4 liked to have at least 64MB. 2K really needed 128MB, (brief fanboy moment: I clung to this pleasingly slimline and reliable OS for grim death until pretty much being forced to XP in the mid 00s). XP SP1 was okay with half a gig, but by SP2 really needed 768MB to be comfortable. Vista needed 128GB.... at least that's how it felt. :D
Windows 95 runs very comfortably (for me at least, maybe i just don't have as much junk on as others) on 8MB ram. It's also the RTM version, so no service packs that might bog down the system
For Vista, 2GB is the actual sweet spot
Are we sure that the hypervisor isn't causing any problems. I know VMware has problems with extremely low amounts of ram, with some hilarious glitches below 32mb.
384MB on Windows 7 is like 64MB on XP I'd say
What do you mean ?
Usually I noticed that windows usually uses either 25%-50% of your ram depending on how mutch ram you have, for example if you have 1-2 gigs of ram ram usage is usually 50% and if your using 4 or more gigabytes of ram its usually 25% usage
Interesting results.
Though I gotta comment on those mentioned W10 insults: I really don't think anyone hating on and advising people to avoid W10 really care about its "efficiency", or even its looks (though its UI design is terrible). It really has more to do with the modern business practices of Microshit itself, and how you're practically selling your soul and computer to them, "signing up for a service" rather than installing a software. And with all those OBLIGATORY updates literally breaking and bricking people's machines, or at least destroying compatibility with quite recent, mainstream applications, there's a lot of issues with W10. So many of such caliber, that I'm literally, no joke, never buying or using another MS product, if they do not make a complete 180-degree turn in the future, and back pedal a mile.
Unrelated, but wow your profile is such a throwback. Haven't seen a fuck G+ theme in a long time.
I have windows 7 running on a 2.2GHz Pentium 4 from around 2003, with 512MB of RAM and a 20GB IDE HDD to run my Dad's "MagicJack" phone service. It's so strange seeing a fairly modern OS on an old machine with such a noisy hard drive. To be fair I have aero and everything else imaginable turned off, and I think the system has a 128MB dedicated nVidia Quadro AGP GPU.
Dead Reckon you didn't have windows 7 ultimate,right? because i tested all windows 7 editions on 256 mb ram(real pc) and only the ultimate edition was very slow,unlike the others,which run smoothly
Not good enought... open google and word and try to use it
it will be super sluggish to swap tasks and save Ram. Part of the Kernel is actively swappable too... OMG
Here is the thing: Microsoft moved Windows Phone to Windows NT kernel instead of Windows CE kernel after Windows Phone 7. That forced Windows NT to run on smaller memories found on phones, and in turn having those memory-saving technologies trickle over to the desktop side of things. While Windows Phone died, we do get the legacy of a slimmer NT kernel that is shared by desktop and console versions of Windows.
You should load Edge and open a couple of sites. Play a youtube video too. Because just booting and showing the menu is not actually working
You missed the whole point of the video then. It's been mentioned countless times along the video that the point in this test was how much RAM was necessary to barely have the OS to boot.
BilisNegra Booting and doing nothing is pointless
Started Programming in Binary on TI-99 4/a with 16K 1983. Was quite fine with stable Windows 2000 Professional using 98MB ram out of 256MB Dell Inspiron, 24 years ago.
The minimum amount of ram I got XP (32-bit) to boot with was 24mb.
This interesting phenomenon is because Windows 10 is way ahead in managing resources compared to Vista, 7 or 8. There are so many things like compression and all going around in Windows 10. If you had used any power shell scripts to clean all the blot that come with Windows 10, I am sure that it will work at memory even less.
P.S. It is also interesting to note that Windows 10 may function on low ram due to above reasons, but will not install well or fast with low ram. I am sure 32 bit don't install at or below 512 MB and 64 bit below 1 gig. I tested with a 64 bit install on 1 gig of ram. Was able to get up to the part were we select language and all. Then it was stuck at just a moment.
if you like small, light and trimmed Win10, take a look at "NTLite": a free tool to slim most Windows to your preferences!!
Try Windows 3.11
Just because Windows 10 starts up with 140MB that doesn't mean it isn't a bloated mess. When svchost, OneDrive, Windows Defender and the indexing service start to utilize all of your CPU and memory all at once, it's a nightmare. Not to mention that even on x64 machines, Windows 7 is happy with only 1GB of RAM even if you have 4GB, while Windows 10 (additionally to the automatically starting nightmare party with the things I mentioned before) uses about 2.5GB on cold boot. In rare cases goes down to 1.5-1.6, but those are luckier times. 2.5 seems the base.
This synthetic test is nothing compared to how problematic is the OS in real life scenarios. Also, nowadays, Patch Tuesday updates make your system un-bootable or on a freshly installed Windows, the drivers that are automatically pulled down from Microsoft's server might also brick everything. Sometimes a reboot solves it, but you can easily get BSOD from them.
And of course, on Windows Pro it's easily manageable, but those with Windows Home (Edition) can't even turn off Windows Defender, because the switch does nothing. First it's fine, until the OS decides that it wants that being turned on (if not other way, after an update that happens instantly). Group Policy should be default on Windows Home, not only for Pro users, because there are lots of things that can't be configured without that Windows component. In Windows 8.1 and earlier we had way more control even in Windows Home, then Microsoft thought that if you want more, then you should pay more. Well, no thanks!
So, this was a great experiment, but it really isn't about what's the lowest limit for booting Windows.
That's still bloated when you compare it to older OSs like Windows 98 or Mac OS 9 or Mac OS X panther and earlier. I've messed with all those older OSs and they are still VERY capable of doing modern tasks.
Those are also all bloated once You compare them to CP/M
All bloated compared to gameboy/assembly
"capable of doing modern tasks"... Well, no. Editing a Word document in windows 98 that can be readable on a more modern computer with more modern software, using compatibility options, etc., is stretching the definition of "capable of doing modern tasks" too much.
I jumped from DOS to W95 to 98 to XP to W7 and now I'm using W10. I'm also a big Linux enthusiast and since I discovered it in early 2000s
Windows 10 is much better than people give it credit for.
In spying on its users for sure.
The main reason people don't like Windows 10 is because of the lack of control and the fact that Windows 10 is full of bloatware apps (preinstalled/self installing junk)
Windows is still using 2gbs of ram. Virtual ram. Disable virtual memory and then we see windows really work hard for resource allocation
I'm using Win10 1903 x64 and it's using 15 gigs of my 32 gigs of RAM when idle. As I learnt from another video, it doesn't actually "use" it, it's just reserving it to make it available much quicker than without the reserving thing. I'm a software engineer and that makes a lot of sense to me. In general, I think, Windows 10 will always use/reserve (at least) around half of what you have, most of the time.
Edit: I disabled the virtual memory. Don't know if that's a factor.
Meanwhile I wanna just watch TH-cam on a laptop with a 333mhz processor and 64mb of ram
Linux, linux, Linux. Some distros can get away with a 100MHz processor (while not all that responsive)
@@KingJellyfishII really? Windows ME runs pretty fast on it
@@KamiKitsuneVA Yeah there are some older lightweight distros that run surprisingly well on very old hardware. Even a fork of Debian Server (which is pretty up-to-date and not really meant as a "lighweight" distro) recommends 96MiB RAM minimum, although granted it doesn't have a desktop.
@@KingJellyfishII I don't think all the vaio features would work on linux though. Vaio has it's own taskbar on Windows 98 and ME
@@KamiKitsuneVA Yeah that's probably True.
When I install fresh copy of Windows 10 on my PC (with 16GB RAM), on startup Windows 10 uses 2GB of RAM. After I install all programs, then when I turn on PC, 3GB of RAM is used.
I laugh at the "minimum recommendation" as running minimum turtles the system and invites BSOD.
minimum if you want to actual do something with the computer is 4gb firefox and word watch movies , if you want to use photoshop with images bigger than 12mp 8gb , 16 for premier pro , and 32 for after effects , also try windows 10 on old netbook with 1gb it open but was unusable , with w7 was working well at 1gb , but install 2 and works fine with w7
My kids computer runs windows 7 with 4 GB of ram and it works fine, my work laptop runs 10 pro and it has 8 GB of ram and works flawlessly.
i think in win 10 4gb is usable for non gaming or heavy multitasking tasks, but usually kinda "pushing it", really 8gb would be alot safer than that, and still good enough for gaming in alot of cases (but 16gb is the sweet spot for gaming). don't remember if win7 was different. Ofc light weight linux distros are kind of king when ikt comes to low-ram pcs.
Xubuntu/Lubuntu and Mint are my favorite distros. I have a Lubuntu and XP Pro dual boot on my old Toshiba laptop.
It still amazes me that Windows might be more functional on low memory devices than Android.
Remember many stripped down hardware systems use a stripped down Windows version too. There is a dev that made Mini Windows 10 and 11 for older hardware/low memory situations.
Damn, I would have expected Windows 7 to run with 128MB, maybe 64 even 🤔
You have to debloat it first
I'd love to know how to "bias" Windows 10 (and other versions) so that it uses little or no "virtual memory" before physical RAM is nearly exhausted. The memory management, even in Windows 10 is arbitrarily and needlessly using swap space too soon.
Hmmm so windows 10 basically uses half of the available RAM? Well I have a 64GiB server >:) windows will have trouble using 32GiB RAM.
Actually not. On this PC with 4GB ram it uses 2GB when idle however on my other PC with 32GB ram it only takes 4GB when idle.
@@JuvStudios well yeah that's why I doubted that it would work
This is just a fallacy. Maybe it uses less ram as a minimum requirement, but 99% of people wouldn't be limited to physically starting the machine. What will make a bigger difference is CPU load, available storage and the amount of background services running.
nice, but yeah.. windows is just.. WAY too demanding, personally i preffer linux where i can easily idle at less than 200mb ram
prefer*
Black Friday deal like over a year ago. For $90 I got RCA netbook with 2GB of RAM with 4 core Adom CPU and I play full HD TH-cam videos on it all the time.
I thought Microsoft recommends 2 gb RAM for Windows 10...
They don't.
Here on Manjaro KDE 2.7 GB in total with the browser open for hours and many tabs open, at least 2 GB is being used for the browser. The great thing is that the memory of the browser barely rises, it easily stays under 4 GB in total for the browser and the system while I am a heavy browser user and on Windows 8 GB certainly is not enough for me. One of the reasons why I like to use LInux, I boot up Windows to game and to run roughly 2 other programs, browsing and multimedia I use with Linux.
Very insightful video. Amazing to see just how much RAM Windows can still work with. While I personally won’t have that issue as I have my old motherboard maxed out with 32GB of DDR3 RAM, it’s nice to know that my smallest stick of RAM I still have, 4GB of DDR3, will still allow Windows to work even if some of my most modern games will be laggy as anything. The funniest thing of this video though: Windows be like “Imma gonna update and you can’t stop me”. 😂
I had Windows 10 installed and running (really slowly) on an Acer Aspire One laptop. 1.5 gig ram, 32 bit CPU, dual core Intel Atom CPU.
You just lost my interest in this video at 1:52
What a waste...
The thing that saved Microsoft after Vista was they really tightened up resource management and made the OS more efficient. Then browser companies and web developers decided only phones get web and browser optimization now. On the desktop that is dead. It is ludicrous when you can eat up almost 3 GBs of RAM with just two tabs open. That is insane. Makes me feel like we are back in the 90s when tabbed browsing just started and more then two tabs would crash your system.
Windows 7 FOR LIFE!
Until it's entirely unsupported
IIRC Windows XP's RAM requirements are 64mb mínimum (and a that amount you can't disable the pagefile) and 128Mb recommended. Compared tto the 512Mb minimum / 1Gb recommended for Vista it is a huge gap.
Also, WinHistory did a XP minimal requirement test where they booted the OS with the bare mínimum hardware to see how low it could go (Spoiler: 18Mb for Ram and an 8Mhz CPU where the lowest)
Whatever Micro$oft recommends, for ram double it.
I remember running Win 95 on 32 mb of ram.
idk if people noticed this but the pagefile size on windows 7 was less than half the size of the one on 10, this test should be done with a disabled pagefile
Colon its gigabyte not gigaram please, this is making me bang my head in
IAmNotCreative21 He said "Gig o(f) RAM"
im serious i can't take it "megaram" "gigaram" please just stop its megabyte or gigabyte
not every time
he is saying gig of ram, if you are making a video it would pretty annouying to keep saying a gigabyte of ram all the time so he used a commonly understood contraction
sorry it sounded like "gigaram"
"boots" and "usable" are quite different thresholds for desktop OS on old hardware. Windows 7 vs 10 is so night and day on these
This video got me started with my Windows XP SP3 Virtual machine, got it to boot with 32MB of RAM in safe mode with networking and Opera browser can still load pages, going to keep going lower though.
UPDATE: 28MB working but now it's starting to feel slow, offline use seems alright but Opera browser is causing issues once it starts to load its UI.
The results are not too surprising, since Windows 10 ditched most of its legacy code for previous versions of Windows, and Internet Explorer. I knew from the beginning that Windows 10 was a less memory intensive OS. It was nice that you were able to prove the point.
If you're trying to play games I'd say 12 gb is the minimum. I had 8 for a while, but a couple of games (AAA titles) required more and crashed the program.
Only for multitasking or high graphics
The less physical memory you have the more virtual memory it uses or is using. In your "tests" the less physical memory it had the more virtual (HDD) it used. This last part has a huge impact on the performance of the computer, some will even throttle back the CPU clock speed (Compaq V2000 does this on XP).
I have an idea, try something like this again but limit the amount of free hard drive space to about 500MB, so Windows doesn't have much space in the page file either.
You can’t do that, maybe video memory?
My pc has a Celeron N2840 2.16GHz can TurboBoost at 2.56GHz, it came with 2gbs of ram and bought a 4gb stick for a couple of dollars, not a problem for Celeron processors, made a lot of different
I've tried all modern versions of windows on a old laptop with 2 GB of RAM. 8.1 by far ran circles around 7 and 10. Sat at around 512 MB RAM usage at idle.
Makes sense with how smaller/lower power computing devices have gotten more popular over the last decade that newer Windows versions would be optimized to work on less beefy hardware. Pretty neat though!
those blue screens are because of windows fast shutdown, you have to hold shift when you click shutdown to avoid that, or disable it completely in settings
or using CMD type shutdown /s for a regular shutdown, or shutdown /hybrid for default fast-boot shutdown.
We have a few workstations at work with 512GB of ram. I think at idle with nothing running they were showing something like 24GB or 32GB of ram in use. They also have an Intel 1.2TB PCIe SSD card in them. Windows seems to scale its ram usage to what it has available. If you really want to try some tight ram usage, try Server 2012R2 Hyper-V Core and Server 2016 Hyper-V core. Both are fully free OSes to download from Microsoft. They basically have almost no GUI. The login screen is a "command prompt window" box in all text. With so little running they may go even tighter on ram.
Despite what people say, win10 is a very well optimized OS, in terms of resource usage, especially considering MS designed its kernel to be able to run on a large array of devices, from IOT to servers. it definitely runs better on older hardware than windows 7 and 8.
I had an old Dell Optiplex GX1 Desktop with 64 MB of Ram and a 450 Mhz Pentium II CPU and was successfully able to boot Windows XP SP3 and run Office 2003 on there with no trouble. the original OS was Windows 98 SE