It can depend a bit on the use. I'm watching content (Jellyfin) on a ThinkCentre M75n IoT Thin Client.
It's underpowered all around. Athlon Silver 3050e, 4GB DDR4 (3.4 avail & not upgraeable) but it's running Win11 enterprise IoT 24H2. The device would sometimes throttle the CPU for unknown reasons (not thermal, no throttle flags). Universal x86 Tuning Utility completely fixed that.
The experience is really good up to 1080p videos. It can choke on 4k but it's a bedroom TV; it's fine. Videos on Firefox are no trouble. I'm quite happy with it.
I remember having a computer and reading about how the CPU (486) could address up to 4 GB of memory. I thought that was maybe a mistake, since even my hard drive was maybe 100 MB, and I had 16 MB of memory IIRC.
I figured maybe they meant hard drive space (which I could kind of imagine being that large).
I think this is slightly misleading. Modern OSes intentionally use available RAM for caching and will reclaim it when needed. The issue isn’t that Windows is “using 6.7 GB”, but whether the system is under memory pressure and paging. I’m not convinced the author fully understands that.
They do mention that the 8 Gig version of the laptop is stuttering while just working on Google Docs in a way that the 16 Gig version does not.
> The Surface Laptop would hang for a few seconds like this several times a day, even when I thought I wasn’t pushing it too hard. I’ve had these temporary freezes while just working in some Google Docs — no Teams call running or anything streaming in the background.
The issue seems to be that there isn't enough RAM for light multitasking or heavier applications without hitting the swap file hard enough that the system stutters.
This distinction is less a gotcha and more actually immediately obvious in the Windows task manager. It shows cached memory separately and in a different colour. The "in use" part is real in-use excluding the page cache.
On my current Windows 11 install i'm using 7 GB with just this Firefox tab open, and another 18GB of "Cached" RAM.
Same as how `free` on Linux shows it in a different column.
It can depend a bit on the use. I'm watching content (Jellyfin) on a ThinkCentre M75n IoT Thin Client.
It's underpowered all around. Athlon Silver 3050e, 4GB DDR4 (3.4 avail & not upgraeable) but it's running Win11 enterprise IoT 24H2. The device would sometimes throttle the CPU for unknown reasons (not thermal, no throttle flags). Universal x86 Tuning Utility completely fixed that.
The experience is really good up to 1080p videos. It can choke on 4k but it's a bedroom TV; it's fine. Videos on Firefox are no trouble. I'm quite happy with it.
It's bizarre to see 8GB spoken of as barely sufficient for basic uses. I remember when the baseline was measured in megabytes.
I remember having a computer and reading about how the CPU (486) could address up to 4 GB of memory. I thought that was maybe a mistake, since even my hard drive was maybe 100 MB, and I had 16 MB of memory IIRC.
I figured maybe they meant hard drive space (which I could kind of imagine being that large).
I think this is slightly misleading. Modern OSes intentionally use available RAM for caching and will reclaim it when needed. The issue isn’t that Windows is “using 6.7 GB”, but whether the system is under memory pressure and paging. I’m not convinced the author fully understands that.
They do mention that the 8 Gig version of the laptop is stuttering while just working on Google Docs in a way that the 16 Gig version does not.
> The Surface Laptop would hang for a few seconds like this several times a day, even when I thought I wasn’t pushing it too hard. I’ve had these temporary freezes while just working in some Google Docs — no Teams call running or anything streaming in the background.
The issue seems to be that there isn't enough RAM for light multitasking or heavier applications without hitting the swap file hard enough that the system stutters.
Related, great article about runtime memory in Linux: https://elinux.org/Runtime_Memory_Measurement
This distinction is less a gotcha and more actually immediately obvious in the Windows task manager. It shows cached memory separately and in a different colour. The "in use" part is real in-use excluding the page cache.
On my current Windows 11 install i'm using 7 GB with just this Firefox tab open, and another 18GB of "Cached" RAM.
Same as how `free` on Linux shows it in a different column.
Try using docker, then you’re really in trouble.