Windows 8 RAM.

Minimum system requirement for RAM on Windows 8 is 2 GB!
Too heavy compared to Windows 7 (only 1 GB).

 

The reality is that both 7 and Vista should have required 2GB to begin with - 1GB simply will not run Vista/7 well. This has always been the case. MS doesn't want any more crappy netbooks being sold with 1GB of RAM for their OS, it's just not giving users a good experience. 1GB will get your OS to boot but any program you use is going to be paging like crazy.

 

I upgraded an older family computer with XP SP3 and 1GB ram to Win7 and it was faster than with XP, though they did later upgrade to 2GB because it was still slow(older dual core pentium D.)

 

The minimum requirement is only 2 GB? It should be 4 GB!, especially if it's 64 bit (which it will be on virtually all pre-loaded machines). The 1 GB requirement is the main reason that Vista ran so poorly and was a terrible flop. Ram is cheap. When you reach the point where you can't tell the difference after adding another 2 GB then you have enough.

 

No one should ever go by minimum requirements. Though they're two different worlds, think of it the same way you'd think of a game. Do you really think that new game is going to run all that well on minimum specs? No, it won't. Take those specs and double them, or come as close as you can to doubling them. No reasonable machine is going to have less than 2Gb of RAM now anyway, unless it's some old clunker being used for email and lighter surfing.

 

Actually, it seems like Windows 8 uses less RAM on the whole than 7 did on my computers. Hungry Man was right, you should have at least 2GB to run Vista/7/8 without paging too hard.

 

...and the minimum for XP was 256 MB. For Windows 95 it was 4 MB. The minimum has never been usable before. Maybe they are just being honest this time. I would not run less than 4 GB on any machine at this point in time. You can't even hardly buy a new machine with less than 4 GB right now. My company just got a new Gateway laptop with 4 GB of RAM for $250.

Windows 8 is running nicely for me right now on 16 GB.

 

In the past 4-5 years did any company sold PCs with less than 2 GB memory?

 

I doubt it. 2 GB became standard with Vista.

 

Between motherboard compatibility and ram prices there is not a good reason to run with less then 4 gigs on a post Vista system.

Funny story about ram and a brand new system. Back when I was in IT the first Vista system I ever saw outside of the shop was a celeron with 512 megs of ram AND onboard video. It also came preinstalled with 2 security apps and a load of other standard OEM junk. The user had called us to check out his new PC to see why it was so slow.

 

512? I'm surprised Vista didn't pop-up a screen with " You're kidding, right?..right?!..guys?".

 

According to the MS site the minimum memory requirements for Windows 8 is same as Windows 7.

1GB 32bit, 2GB 64bit.

http://windows.microsoft.com/en-US/windows-8/system-requirements
http://windows.microsoft.com/en-US/windows7/products/system-requirements

 

Sorry xxJackxx, but this is from Microsoft:

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/314865

The minimum hardware requirements for Windows XP Home Edition are:

At least 64 megabytes (MB) of RAM (128 MB is recommended)


Unbelievable! I've only once come across a PC running XP on 128megs and it was a truly awful experience - running on 64megs is hard to imagine.

I worked for a school once that had PCs running XP with 256megs. The network administrator who bought the PCs thought he was being proactive by doubling the 128meg "recommended" requirement. Those machines ran like cr*p. XP only becomes usable with 512megs and only begins to reach its potential with 1gb. For Vista/7/8 just extrapolate up from there

 

In my opinion, Vista was a flop for two reasons: low-balled "Vista Ready" system requirements, and bad hardware support. I think Microsoft learned their lesson: if you advertise an unreasonably low minimum RAM, people will flip their lid.

 

Exactly. They're simply being honest about it now. Even on 2 gigs it's sluggish. Even on 4, for that matter, compared to XP on 1.

 

This is OT, but regarding the bad hardware support I think Microsoft was blamed for what was really the responsibility of the third party vendors who didn't get out Vista compatible drivers for printers, scanners, etcetera, but the bottomline was after people installed Vista a lot of their older hardware didn't work. I think Microsoft learned that lesson and has much more support out of the box now.

Now back to ram requirements....

 

You're right - 4GB for Windows 7/8 x64 with motherboard graphics = not enough.

 

my boss was trying to run a business machine with Win 7 on 1 Gb of RAM.

i told him he was looking for trouble.
so yes, eventually the machine caved in under the load and he had to re-install XP.

 

I have found windows 8 to be quite alot faster than windows 7 on the same hardware. You should never use an operating system on mimimum requirements anyway since the minimum is for just windows itself and not for other programs as well. windows xp minimum system requirements is 64mb of ram but there is no way anyone would run windows xp with that little amount of ram.

I would say minimum ram for vista, 7 and 8 should be at least 2GB. I have worked on plenty of computers with vista that have 1gb of memory and they are mega slow but when i added a second gb it made a big difference. My laptop which is quite a few years old now has 4gb of ram. ram is cheap so i dont see the issue.

the main reason vista was apparently a failed operating system was because hp,acer dell etc decided to ship systems with minimum requirements and then add a ton of bloatware to it and people wondered why the machines were so slow. you cant blame MS for that.

 

XP is so slow with 256 I was thinking it was the minimum. Wow, I cannot even begin to imagine installing it on the minimum system (233 Pentium with 64 MB of RAM). My Windows 95 machine had better specs than that.

 

I've just gone from 2Gb to 4Gb win7 & its a world of difference. Win7 & 2Gb was an unpleasant experience. Especially now looking back, you could call Win7 users running on 1 & 2GB 'masochists'.

 

I completely agree. I'm still using Vista 32 bit on my 5 years old (was considered fast then) notebook, 2 GB RAM.

I'm very happy with it, in terms of speed, it uses about 800 MB of memory at this very moment with only Wilders opened, but goes easily over 1GB with two-three tabs opened simultaneously. At startup memory usage lingers around 1.2 GB for a couple of minutes which would slow down to a crawl any machine with 1GB RAM. I also think that nowadays 2GB is the minimum requirement to have a decent performance.

 

needing 2GB or even 1GB
tells me it is a over weight bloated piece of

I have never seen my system use more than 700MB
at a time even under a heavy load like video encoding

 

8 does not need that much, it is just what MS expect people to be running alongside with their latest OS like a heavy AV, a browser, a messaging software and so on.

Well I have an onboard laptop graphics with 1,74 GB usable for OS and it runs better and faster than the most desktop PCs I saw with 4GB, but overloaded with a junk.

Mine OS takes about 300MB flat -http://oi50.tinypic.com/2yoa4pf.jpg , my Chrome takes almost 3 times more RAM. I go over 1GB usage mostly only when playing games.

 

I agree that part of getting optimal performance is eliminating the "junk", but my feeling about ram is I spent too many years without enough because it was too expensive. Now that it's inexpensive I don't want ram to be a bottleneck in my computers. I would rather have a little more than the system needs to be confident that no unnecessary paging is happening. I realize that my general comment "4GB for Windows 7/8 x64 with motherboard graphics = not enough" is not going to be true for everyone in all circumstances. I just find it odd that some people (and I don't mean you) will actually argue for using less. If you want best performance that just doesn't make sense to me.