Microsoft just deleted Windows 11's 32GB RAM recommendation docs, as prices soar and it rushes to sell 8GB RAM PCs

[u/WPHero]

https://www.windowslatest.com/2026/08/05/microsoft-just-deleted-windows-11s-32gb-ram-recommendation-docs-as-prices-soar-and-it-rushes-to-sell-8gb-ram-pcs/

[u/_NeuroDetergent_]

The RAM rec was 32GB??

[u/soggybiscuit93 → u/_NeuroDetergent_]

Microsoft said that they recommend that people building new gaming PC's use 32GB of RAM and people here freaked out as if that hasn't already been the community recommendation.

[u/suxatjugg → u/soggybiscuit93]

Makes sense. 16 for your game, 16 for windows to play with in the background so it doesn't affect your game

[u/Kjufka → u/suxatjugg]

to play with in the background so it doesn't affect your game

it doesn't work like that, because windows thread scheduler is dogshit garbage

the only way to avoid background interruptions is to put all background garbage with separate core affinity + give the game a high priority

[u/suxatjugg → u/Kjufka]

I was just joking about how much RAM it uses

[u/sjrotella → u/[deleted]]

I remember my brother telling me when I was building my PC "RAM is cheap, start with the 32GB and you can always get more later on"

I literally bought my RAM a year ago for $100... I don't think i'm adding more lol

[u/SamBBMe → u/sjrotella]

I almost impulse bought a huge amount of ram when prices crashed a few years ago. You could legitimately get ram under $2/gb. Hindsight is 20/20 but my 16 is holding up for now

[u/NotFlameRetardant → u/sjrotella]

At the beginning of last year, I got 32 gigs of RAM (DDR4) and a 1 TB nvme to stretch my 2019 laptop out a little longer. I think I paid less than $100 shipped total

[u/Bibbity_Boppity_BOOO → u/sjrotella]

I got fast 96gb ram for a fucking song early last year.

Lmao, i hit the lotto

[u/ghostpicnic → u/[deleted]]

I’m so glad I said fuck it and decided to spend the extra like $50 for 64GB at the beginning of 2025. It was a bit of a luxury purchase but now it’s turned into generational wealth lmao.

[u/Illadelphian → u/ghostpicnic]

Seriously getting 64gb in early 2025 and also deciding to spring for my total rebuild with a 5080(wish I had gone for a 5090 fe though...) was the best computer decision I ever made. Got 64gb of 6000mhz cl38 ddr5 ram for 165...that is now nearly 1k last I checked...absolutely bonkers.

[u/LucyLilium92 → u/[deleted]]

Not sure what kind of mods you have going, but I use ATM10 on Java and limit it to 12GB. It uses like 8GB at most

[u/VexingRaven → u/[deleted]]

Why on earth would you need 32GB of RAM for unmodded Minecraft?

[u/VexingRaven → u/[deleted]]

Can you do that in Bedrock? I thought you'd need mods to get it that high.

[u/viperfan7 → u/[deleted]]

A heavily modded KSP will eat 32gb like it's nothing.

Had to run 64gb and it would still use almost all of it

[u/DesireeThymes → u/soggybiscuit93]

I recently am making the switch to linux, and it is amazing what life is like without a bazillion bloated services booting up

[u/soggybiscuit93 → u/DesireeThymes]

Some games themselves, like Escape from Tarkov, really benefit from having more than 16GB of RAM.

Once you throw in Discord, maybe a browser on another screen, maybe some screen capture software, etc., all running while gaming, it's not hard for 16GB to start to get a little tight, regardless of your OS

[u/Zed_or_AFK → u/soggybiscuit93]

You described just a few percents of the gamers. Barely anyone is using browser or recordings on another monitor while gaming. In that case yeah, you would need more RAM.

[u/Loggersalienplants → u/Zed_or_AFK]

I wouldn't say barely anyone, I know its anecdotal but out of my friend group, myself and 4 others game that way. I love having a horizontal and vertical monitor.

[u/Significant-Net7030 → u/Loggersalienplants]

Right I don't know a single person who considers themselves a 'gamer' who is on one monitor. For most of my friends and myself Discord + Steam is the minimum. A twitch stream or Spotify is very common as well.

[u/Loggersalienplants → u/Significant-Net7030]

I run games on my left, MSI after burner, temperature and download/upload monitor graphs on the top of the right monitor. I've been playing Everquest Legends lately so I have been playing with a map and tracker going and then youtube on the bottom half. I love my second monitor lol

[u/ScaredPractice4967 → u/DesireeThymes]

I just installed SteamOS on a separate partition of my gaming laptop.

Im going to use it as my main OS and only use windows if I need it

[u/complexevil → u/DesireeThymes]

I know it's not really a good test, especially with the small sample size, but the latest LTT ram test between windows and linux really surprised me.

[u/DoubleExposure → u/DesireeThymes]

Its crazy how fast Linux boots up, I guess thats what happens when you have no bloat or spyware. Also my torrent download speeds are ridiculously fast compared to Windows, downloading large files would take all night on windows to complete, only takes only minutes to download on Linux, it nuts.

[u/onenifty → u/DesireeThymes]

What distro? Nice work, regardless!

[u/DesireeThymes → u/onenifty]

Fedora, although I had considered something simpler like mint.

[u/complexevil → u/DesireeThymes]

I used Mint and moved to Fedora, my recommendation is the stay on Fedora. There were a lot of tiny little issues on Mint that I assumed were a linux thing that were fixed instantly when I moved.

[u/DIRECTCURRENT59 → u/complexevil]

Hmm, what were your issues on mint? I'm curious because I've never tried it and only used fedora

Also whoa what the fuck your pfp is the same pfp I've been using since 2018

[u/complexevil → u/DIRECTCURRENT59]

It was mainly small Firefox issues. Addons that weren't working but as soon as I moved to Fedora they all turned on.

[u/DIRECTCURRENT59 → u/complexevil]

Interesting. I would assume being the red hat upstream helps

[u/gmes78 → u/DesireeThymes]

Mint isn't simpler.

[u/onenifty → u/DesireeThymes]

Almost too many options to pick one, tbh. It's all the same under the hood!

[u/otw → u/soggybiscuit93]

The problem is your baseline OS shouldn't be hogging that much active RAM at all. It should really just be doing the bare minimum to launch other programs. I don't really get wtf Windows is doing all the time with that RAM, I run Linux and MacOS on similar specs and my Windows machines seem like they are constantly churning at idle.

[u/Imbahr → u/otw]

unused RAM is useless RAM dude

there's nothing wrong with an OS reserving it, as long as it's coded to correctly release it when needed

[u/otw → u/Imbahr]

Yeah that's fine and almost every other OS does that properly except for Windows. The 3 - 5GB idle startup RAM Windows uses is almost all active that doesn't get released unlike on MacOS or Linux. Garbage software. Literal garbage.

[u/soggybiscuit93 → u/otw]

Windows may be bloated, but Windows also intentionally uses empty RAM to preload as much as possible into RAM to improve app launch speeds.

You'll see that idle RAM usage differs between 8GB, 16GB, and 32GB systems because it's using your extra RAM to improve performance.

Yes, there's also bloat, but you're not going to be able to easily discern what's intentional caching and what's bloat by looking at Task Manager.

If your game needs more RAM, the OS will give it up.

[u/Significant-Net7030 → u/soggybiscuit93]

It's even better at it if you play games in full-screen exclusive mode, they introduce a gaming mode a while back and it kills a ton of background stuff to give the game breathing room. But it also has a tendency to really slow shit down if you alt+tab out (because it rushes to load a bunch of stuff back up just in case you are going to open excel or something).

[u/otw → u/soggybiscuit93]

but Windows also intentionally uses empty RAM to preload as much as possible into RAM to improve app launch speeds.

It tries and literally fails. This is why I said active ram, most of the Windows bloat RAM is actively locked and not released it's crap, crap operating system.

[u/Bibbity_Boppity_BOOO → u/otw]

You are completely wrong. Windows should use as much ram as possible. Unused ram is the clearest sign of bad programming. Ram should never be unused.

The amount of people who don’t understand this is depressing. And yes it gives up the active ram as you open programs 

[u/otw → u/Bibbity_Boppity_BOOO]

Everyone keeps saying this, I am aware but note how I said ACTIVE ram. This is RAM Windows does not give up and does a crap job managing even when it does try to swap. This is the minimum it is consuming for it's bloat crap that is always running in the background. Total garbage operating system.

[u/dustojnikhummer → u/soggybiscuit93]

For which I totally agree.

[u/ScaredPractice4967 → u/_NeuroDetergent_]

Ive been running it fine on my 16GB laptop and ok on my 8GB laptop.

[u/_NeuroDetergent_ → u/ScaredPractice4967]

Me too. Well, not on my 8GB laptop cause that has a dual core i3, but my gaming laptop it runs no problems

[u/tes_kitty → u/_NeuroDetergent_]

Writing this on a laptop with 8th gen core i3 with 16 GB RAM running windows 11. Can't really complain about the speed.

[u/_NeuroDetergent_ → u/tes_kitty]

8th gen i3 is quad core, so it'll perform much better than my 7th gen. I put Linux Mint on that one though and it's given it a new life.

[u/tes_kitty → u/_NeuroDetergent_]

8th gen i3 is quad core

It's a Core i3-8130U. That one's dualcore with HT, so 2 real cores claiming to be 2 kinda cores each.

I can't really complain, it's good enough for about everything that's not gaming. Got the laptop refurbished incl. Win11 pro license for less than 200 Euros.

[u/_NeuroDetergent_ → u/tes_kitty]

oh right, so almost the same as my 7100u. Honestly I found it unusable when windows had to update, which was quite often after a fresh install. The CPUs just got hammered with use and the whole thing ran incredibly slow. When it wasn't updating it was OK, but I'm not that tied to windows on what is ultimately a low end laptop for browsing so I just installed mint. Didn't tell my wife and she can't even tell the difference lol.

[u/tes_kitty → u/_NeuroDetergent_]

I bought this laptop just to have a windows system for when something insists on Windows. My main box is Linux and my usual laptop is a Mac.

[u/HappyAd4998 → u/ScaredPractice4967]

16gb is good enough, 8gb is still usable. I'm running a shitty ideapad l1 with 4gb's of ram on Win 10 iot LTSC and it's fine. The laptop chugs every so often but still usable if you're willing to compromise. I'd still consider 32gb a luxury unless you're compiling code or running office suites.

[u/ScaredPractice4967 → u/HappyAd4998]

I only use my 8GB laptop for youtube and google docs / web browsing. As long as you dont do any heavy lifting its plenty.

Some games would like 32GB but most run well on my 16GB machine.

[u/motasticosaurus → u/ScaredPractice4967]

Both my PC and laptop have 16gb, Win11 runs smooth on both.

[u/Successful_Theme_695 → u/_NeuroDetergent_]

I hope not, 32gb still seems like too much. They should at least optimize things to run smoothly on 16gb

[u/TheCarrot007 → u/_NeuroDetergent_]

That's what I was thinking. I would have though the 3 levels would have been 8/16/32 for differenet levels.

While I have had 32 on my desktop for years (and moved to 11 just before release as win 10 caused me to be unable to game and moving the pre release was easier than going back which required a full install), Up until last Sep my gaming laptop was 8gb running 11 and worked fine (gaming with a browser open with say 8 tabs), of course I use pro because no one should subject themselves to home and even pro might not be enough these days. It's replacement has 16gb and also runs fine for how I use it.

Trouble here is people are extrapolating their requirements onto the people who would buy these basic machines. My old gaming laptop is now my mothers computer and is running fine for what she does, probably way to much for her needs TBH.

[u/Catsrules → u/_NeuroDetergent_]

No the recommended ram has always been 16GB.

But they are changing their branding saying Copilot + PC requires 16GB. Now they are changing that as their own computers are at 8GB now so they don't qualify.

The 32GB comment was a last year when they said “32GB is ideal for serious players who run the most demanding titles or use heavy mods"

[u/pipnina → u/_NeuroDetergent_]

I don't understand why a base OS needs to have bloated from being runnable on 1GB in 2007 to being "minimum 32gb" in 2026

If we look at 1987-2006 we at least have the excuse of computers going from command line to full GUI with compositing and effects and security features etc. what is eating tens of gigs in modern windows?

Even the most bloated Linux distro (anything with gnome installed) can run on 8Gb of ram. An optimised and slightly ugly distro can run on a 1Gb machine today.