Wednesday, August 5th 2026
Microsoft Is Quietly Deleting 32 GB RAM Recommendation for Windows 11
Microsoft is retroactively removing documentation from its website and materials that mention 32 GB of RAM as a recommendation for new PC builds or purchases. Instead, the company is now emphasizing 8 GB devices that are optimized to run Windows 11 smoothly, even with that RAM configuration. Thanks to Windows Latest, which spotted the changes, Microsoft's Windows Learning Center has been updated to remove mentions of the 32 GB RAM recommendation. Previously, Microsoft published a document suggesting that 16 GB is a baseline for a modern PC, describing it as a good "starting point." However, the company also used to recommend that gamers try to surpass this baseline, suggesting 32 GB as a "no worries" upgrade for gaming PCs.
At that time, this sparked significant controversy as gamers were vocal about Microsoft recommending more RAM when purchasing additional memory could cost as much as an entire PC, depending on the configuration. Amid a severe DRAM shortage, Microsoft faced pushback from gamers and quietly removed the mention of the 32 GB "no worries" recommendation. This also raised concerns about whether Microsoft would optimize the Windows 11 operating system to perform better on lower-spec PCs with less than 16 GB of RAM, such as the 8 GB PCs that Microsoft sells itself, like the Surface Pro 12 and Surface Laptop 13, both of which come with 8 GB base configurations.
We already know that the company is overhauling many components within its Windows 11 operating system. Microsoft has made substantial improvements in memory efficiency and latency to accelerate the modernization of Windows 11. It has reduced memory overhead across apps and components and has optimized WinUI 3 to make built-in apps use less memory. Microsoft also outlined its plans for future Windows 11 memory efficiency improvements, specifically stating that the Windows team will be working on "memory optimization for 8 GB and above." As a result, the company has removed recommendations and mentions of 32 GB RAM from its documents and websites to avoid additional pushback.
Source:
Windows Latest
At that time, this sparked significant controversy as gamers were vocal about Microsoft recommending more RAM when purchasing additional memory could cost as much as an entire PC, depending on the configuration. Amid a severe DRAM shortage, Microsoft faced pushback from gamers and quietly removed the mention of the 32 GB "no worries" recommendation. This also raised concerns about whether Microsoft would optimize the Windows 11 operating system to perform better on lower-spec PCs with less than 16 GB of RAM, such as the 8 GB PCs that Microsoft sells itself, like the Surface Pro 12 and Surface Laptop 13, both of which come with 8 GB base configurations.
56 Comments on Microsoft Is Quietly Deleting 32 GB RAM Recommendation for Windows 11
Nowadays internet browsers take the piss too. They have evolved from something that opens web pages to full blown operating systems within the operating system. Every tab feels like its running its own application. Some stricter measures to sink the boat load of bloat in browsers would be nice too.
We can't just blame Windows... third party software devs are just as guilty. For too long RAM has been cheap and devs have become too focused on rapid development by relying on layers of pre-built software toolkits and fat libraries instead of writing stuff from scratch. Basically, convenience over efficiency.
Hopefully this shift pushes both MS and third party devs to start optimising software again instead of assuming everyone will just throw more RAM at the problem.
Among other things and PR etc etc etc
32GB was yesterday, 8GB is enough for everyone today ...
I wonder how M$ is gonna pull it off with all of that data extraction
running constantly in the background with 200+ background services
with hilarious descriptions cognitive tar pit, read 5 - its game over
btw. it works a lot faster/better with those disabled and no pagefile.sys
is allowed, i dont like my drives to be crippled by constant writes
- Open Start and search for System Configuration (or run msconfig).
- Go to the Boot tab → Advanced options.
- Check Maximum memory and enter the desired limit in MB (e.g., 4096 for 4 GB, 8192 for 8 GB).
- Apply, OK, and restart.
I tried it just now with 8GB because in another thread here there are some very uninformed people claiming that Win11 might run in 8GB but you can't actually do anything - which I know is nonsense. So, I set it to 8192 and rebooted. I have so many nice OS and hardware goodies installed that it reserved about 1.1GB in Hardware Reserved (untouchable!) memory. So with 6.9GB for everything else I went about opening everything I might typically want to in my normal 64GB (32GB these days) system work-flow.The 38.9 gigs is the total commit limit - the maximum amount of memory Windows can promise to all programs combined. It's calculated as usable physical RAM + Size of pagefile on disk (32Gig - unchanged from before the SysConfig HARD Limit was set. So Magic Windows 11 Pro is promising about 2 more GB than I actually have at the time of that screen shot - knida...
I went right to work... I can't actually show what I'm working on currently so i loaded an older scene into LW3D (recent version) and sent the model to Modeler so I could edit the mesh while animating it in Layout (2 separate programs linked through "LW HUB");
And of course gotta have a browser with a kazillian tabs open so I loaded that up and additionally loaded and displayed a very high resolution PDF - as if I needed to look something up for LW operation. Paged through it a bit to buffer 20 or 30 pages. So far everything is acting exactly the same as if I were running in 32GB - zero slow-down - including with the browser.
Oh wait I need to find that script... the one which has sdfsdfsdf_werwesrfwe(); in it. Zeroed the results because I don't wanna shot that kinda data in public - golly <blush>. It's running through the folders and searching same speed as always;
Found it... Let's go there and see the size of all the files and folders in that location (can't show the actual location so just top level is shown). Another app opened and two drives completely scanned (one HDD and one NVMe) - took about 25 seconds (just like usual) and of course the app loaded instantly:
What else do I often do... ah, show the boys what I'm working on, my ideas, etc. so they can tell me what a dumb idea it is (or isn't) and grimace with vindication... So my video editor it is... (everything else is still running and in memory BTW) It loads instantly like always and I load an animation I made for you guys at TPU a few weeks back:
It's not heavily layered but it's 30 seconds of 1384x1080p loaded ALL into RAM - no proxy or anything. It plays fine - full 30FPS like I have it set to - no hitches or anything.
Next I start flipping from app to app to see if switching and using them will bind things up. Spoiler alert: It didn't. Every thing was smooth like I had just loaded it into a normal 64GB system - no drive grinding or anything - just a few blips once in awhile - not terribly different from how Windows treats them normally...
It's showing LW Layout and LW Modeler twice because I used Win11 SnapAssist to join them together - thus they're selectable individually and as a "Desktop" group. If I had more apps open those would all scroll and fan out up off the top of the screen with the mouse-wheel. Ah, I forgot to load Photoshop, Illustration and LibreOffice - oh-well, next time.
All that in 8GB of RAM and zero slowdown or chugging. Nice. So I changed the SysConfig → Boot → Advanced → Maximum Memory back to normal [off], rebooted and here I am.
Fun times! :D
Yeah, 16GB is fine - even for 99% of the 137,000 games available on Steam! :D
Btw. Lightwave is still alive? I thought Modo (from your screenshots, it looks a lot like Modo to me) was the next thing (until it was dropped, a year or so ago), figures...
I smell some Amiga here :]
LOL, kudos for the grepwin, hehehe, just use msys2 and add the coreutils to your binpath, add normal terminal stuff with clink (tab completion, sane keyboard shortcuts emacs, lua scripting for some extra magic)
Strangely, for me, on IoT LTSC, it didn't work the other day, changing RAM size with msconfig.
People, i hereby declare, "Water is wet". (implying that DRAM is scare and should not be wasted by using the wrong software, wrong configuration, etc.)
More Money can solve everything, afaik AMD Milan ships with up to / at least 2TiB of DRAM and a few cpu cores. you may need another windows license to address only 2TiB of DRAM and those few cpu cores.
mint is bloated, my box idles around 512mib dram. not optimised for dram, it was below 250mib for years.ask my refurbished notebook wiht 22% lost health on the SAMSUMG OEM NVME with 8gib dram and 250gb nvme from samsung
disable those 3 or 4 swap files in windows and several apps will not start with 8gib dram, i did that earlier this year.
Didn't LTT just do a video on memory usage between Windows and Linux using the same apps and doing the same things? The difference is eye watering, even on top of all the bloat in Windows.
Every single time (almost) he presents himself as a tech, he gets in big trouble for blowing chunks as knowledgeable people call him out on his nonsense. If people are listening to channels like that without looking stuff up for themselves, I can finally begin to understand the reality disconnect I read in forums like this.
Should make it a requirement to write a test program in C# to get through the door.
Regards,
Fred.