3 ms·

> mechanical hard drive and a feeble 8 GB of RAM (is that even enough to run Windows by itself?) Windows 10 runs acceptably on a Core 2 Duo with 4 GB of RAM -

> mechanical hard drive and a feeble 8 GB of RAM (is that even enough to run Windows by itself?) Windows 10 runs acceptably on a Core 2 Duo with 4 GB of RAM - this was my son's gaming PC until a couple of months ago. (It did have an SSD, though - a mechanical hard drive would certainly have reduced the snappiness.)

imoverclocked 3y ago
It’s pretty crazy that an operating system needs that much at all. I mean, we all get used to these big numbers but 4GB is actually a lot of bits. A single GB can store more books than a human can read in their lifetime. Somehow, we have accepted that the most fundamental piece of software on a computer should require many lifetimes worth of books of RAM. We have come a long way from thinking we would never need more than 640k!
- dharmab 3y ago
  By point of comparison, my fairly minimal Linux partition uses ~200MB of RAM after booting, and I suspect a good chunk of that is cache.
- at_a_remove 3y ago
  I used to kill off services I didn't need on my Windows NT 4.0 Workstation ... I could get it down to thirteen megabytes of RAM used.
- dagmx 3y ago
  But you’re conflating data at rest vs data in memory. A pdf for example can be very small but then take up considerably more memory to display an embedded image once it’s done decompressing for render. Similarly text is more expensive just by virtue of higher resolution displays. What we ask of our machines has expanded greatly, and the immediacy with which people want things to load is more exacting too, so a lot of content is kept warm in memory. I’m not saying 4GB is a healthy amount and I agree there’s likely room for optimization, but let’s not also act like there aren’t huge advances in what computers do to necessitate that either
  - imoverclocked 3y ago
    I’m not sure I’m conflating anything. A bit is a bit. Some bits are faster than others but it’s all just bits in the end. Yes, compressed content can take up more bits when uncompressed. Also, compression can’t reduce size beyond what information is actually there without losing that information somehow. Just because we are not good at working with compressed content and require a lot of RAM to deal with raw/uncompressed data doesn’t mean it’s not wasteful or even that it’s the only way to do it. I’m glad you agree we have come a long way too. Perhaps as we collectively go further, we will find ways of accomplishing even more with fewer resources. — written from a pocket sized computer with far more bits than the total number of humans that have ever existed
  - walteweiss 3y ago
    I used such a computer (4GB DDR3 ram and 2 GHz dual core Pentium) for some very basic work tasks on Windows 10 LTSC (the one without the bloat). It had Windows due to some weird hardware incompatibility, so I used it for about a month. The computer is used for browser with a couple of Google Spreadsheets opened tabs and a couple of messengers once in a while to reply to some messages. It was almost unusable in that very scenario. I could handle a couple of tabs, but once I opened a couple of extra tabs (e.g. some search either through Google or any local shops) it literally hanged. I had to wait for it (to swap, I suppose) for a couple of minutes to unfreeze. I went very angry over time and replaced the weird incompatible with Linux component (GPU) for another one and now it runs Fedora 39 with default Gnome 45 installed. It works perfectly well and it hangs only when I open relatively big number of tabs, 15 to 20, which is a lot for the use-case of that very machine. I thought of optimising the machine to run just swaywm (which eats like 300 MB compared to over 2GB of Gnome), but I never faced any issue for over a 3 months period. So I would confirm that even 4 GB is plenty unless you need a big number of browser tabs opened. But not with Windows. Windows was usable on that machine if you don’t use browser heavily, but very very lightly.
    - nfriedly 3y ago
      SSD or mechanical hard drive?

imoverclocked 3y ago

It’s pretty crazy that an operating system needs that much at all. I mean, we all get used to these big numbers but 4GB is actually a lot of bits. A single GB can store more books than a human can read in their lifetime. Somehow, we have accepted that the most fundamental piece of software on a computer should require many lifetimes worth of books of RAM. We have come a long way from thinking we would never need more than 640k!

dharmab 3y ago
By point of comparison, my fairly minimal Linux partition uses ~200MB of RAM after booting, and I suspect a good chunk of that is cache.
at_a_remove 3y ago
I used to kill off services I didn't need on my Windows NT 4.0 Workstation ... I could get it down to thirteen megabytes of RAM used.
dagmx 3y ago
But you’re conflating data at rest vs data in memory. A pdf for example can be very small but then take up considerably more memory to display an embedded image once it’s done decompressing for render. Similarly text is more expensive just by virtue of higher resolution displays. What we ask of our machines has expanded greatly, and the immediacy with which people want things to load is more exacting too, so a lot of content is kept warm in memory. I’m not saying 4GB is a healthy amount and I agree there’s likely room for optimization, but let’s not also act like there aren’t huge advances in what computers do to necessitate that either
- imoverclocked 3y ago
  I’m not sure I’m conflating anything. A bit is a bit. Some bits are faster than others but it’s all just bits in the end. Yes, compressed content can take up more bits when uncompressed. Also, compression can’t reduce size beyond what information is actually there without losing that information somehow. Just because we are not good at working with compressed content and require a lot of RAM to deal with raw/uncompressed data doesn’t mean it’s not wasteful or even that it’s the only way to do it. I’m glad you agree we have come a long way too. Perhaps as we collectively go further, we will find ways of accomplishing even more with fewer resources. — written from a pocket sized computer with far more bits than the total number of humans that have ever existed
- walteweiss 3y ago
  I used such a computer (4GB DDR3 ram and 2 GHz dual core Pentium) for some very basic work tasks on Windows 10 LTSC (the one without the bloat). It had Windows due to some weird hardware incompatibility, so I used it for about a month. The computer is used for browser with a couple of Google Spreadsheets opened tabs and a couple of messengers once in a while to reply to some messages. It was almost unusable in that very scenario. I could handle a couple of tabs, but once I opened a couple of extra tabs (e.g. some search either through Google or any local shops) it literally hanged. I had to wait for it (to swap, I suppose) for a couple of minutes to unfreeze. I went very angry over time and replaced the weird incompatible with Linux component (GPU) for another one and now it runs Fedora 39 with default Gnome 45 installed. It works perfectly well and it hangs only when I open relatively big number of tabs, 15 to 20, which is a lot for the use-case of that very machine. I thought of optimising the machine to run just swaywm (which eats like 300 MB compared to over 2GB of Gnome), but I never faced any issue for over a 3 months period. So I would confirm that even 4 GB is plenty unless you need a big number of browser tabs opened. But not with Windows. Windows was usable on that machine if you don’t use browser heavily, but very very lightly.
  - nfriedly 3y ago
    SSD or mechanical hard drive?