I recently got a new laptop that has about 12 Gigabytes of Memory, and in my opinion, it is one of the smoothest and durable laptops I have ever used. I use a Lenovo Ideapad 3, that was gifted to me by my aunt. It has a Ryzen 5 3500U processor, and 12GB of RAM. I have been using it for about 10 months now, and I have not had any issues with it. It is a great laptop.

Around the some time after I got this laptop, my friends too started buying laptops of their own. Some bought the huge gaming laptops, some bought the sleek and slim ones, and some bought the ones that were the best bang for the buck. They all had varying amounts of RAM, but the most common amount was 8GB.

That really surprised me and I started reading into it a bit, and I found out that currently, 8GB of RAM is the minimum amount of RAM that you should have in your computer. I was really surprised by this, because I remember when I was a kid, 8GB of RAM was the top of the line, and only the best computers had that much RAM. Now, it’s the minimum amount of RAM that you should have in your computer.

Now, not to hate on technological advancements, but I think that this is a bit ridiculous. Windows 11, now needs 8GB of RAM to run. I think that this is a bit ridiculous, because I remember when Windows 7 was the latest version of Windows, and it ran perfectly fine on 2GB of RAM.

I have seen a few of these laptops that have 8GB of RAM, and they are really slow. Chrome now takes upto 3GB of RAM to run smoothly. Now, Chrome is a known RAM hog, but still, 3GB of RAM is a lot. 3GB is the minimum amount of RAM you need to run Kubuntu, a Linux distro, at a decent speed.

Microsoft Windows has become so huge, that it now needs 8GB of RAM to run. To get that into perspective, Windows 7 needed 1GB of RAM to run. Windows 10 needed 2GB of RAM to run. Windows 11 needs 8GB of RAM to run. That is a huge jump in the amount of RAM needed to run Windows. Most people partially attribute this to the fact that Windows 11 uses a lot of RAM to run the new UI that is filled with internet connected widgets and stuff. I know that Microsoft has changed it’s business model to get more money from Microsoft services rather than from Windows, but this is too far.

8GB of RAM should be enough. It should be enough to run a browser, and a few other apps. But it isn’t. It is barely enough to run a browser. The max you can get done with 8GB, considering you have a lower end processor, is to run a browser, and a few other apps. You can’t do much more than that.

Now, this is not as serious as it sounds. Manufacturing costs are slowly going down, and RAM is becoming cheaper. So, maybe, it’s not that big of a deal. But still, I think that this is where it should stop. 8GB of RAM should be enough. If the new Windows 12 needs 16GB of RAM to run, then I think that it is a bit too much and the Windows is being rushed for the sake of it.