It's the web browser that is the killer for old computers. The damned web browsers will sit there and demand 600 MB of RAM just idling. Wanna watch KZfaq? Forget it. From a software engineering standpoint, the web browser is the most kludgy wreck of rolling design demands and scope creep ever. The web browser has even made the "Just install Linux on old computers" mantra not ring so true unless you are willing to use something like Links2, w3m, or Midori.

Windows XP SP1 can actually boot and run in as little as 48 MB of RAM, at least with the Classic theme and all visual frills disabled. However, SP2 was a major overhaul with a new kernel and lots of new features, so it takes up more RAM.

Google Chrome: "I'm about to end this man's whole career."

Btw, the reason windows 10 uses so much ram in the 2gb case is that it always caches the harddisk. This is a good thing. So it's really easy for windows to just not do that in the case of lower ram size.

Fun fact: Windows 95 could theoretically run on a modern system with no RAM at all. It needs 8MB, which means it could fit entirely in CPU cache. I doubt it (or any BIOS) would be willing to actually boot that way though.

Don't base what you guess Windows RAM needs are on what OEMs sell machines installed with. That was the whole problem Vista had back when it was new - OEMs would sell machines with 1GB of RAM preinstalled, Windows Vista would be using 90% of that just existing, so as soon as you started much of anything up you were into virtual RAM and the whole system started grinding. That I'm convinced is a lot of what got Vista the reputation it had. If you looked at Vista later in its life, like well into when Windows 7 was the standard, it was fine. I know a few people who used Vista right till the bitter end, and usually it was because their machines were way more powerful than those early Vista machines, and they had enough resources to run it well. In that situation, it really wasn't all that different to use than 7 was.

Those results were pretty much exactly what I expected. It's well known that Microsoft have been doing their best to optimise RAM usage since vista came out which is exactly what we're seeing here.

512 mb on win10 runs better than the computers at my school

Some of your blue screens may have been caused by the system trying to resume from hybrid shutdown mode. When you click "shut down" in 8 and newer, it goes into that pseudo-hibernated state. It might be worth a try with that feature turned off.

Windows 10 can do 140Mb RAM, surpassing the other OSs, because it has memory compression. So in actually Windows 8 (at 168MB) might be the winner.

I don't think your Mac was even writing that pagefile to disk. The VM made so many changes in that area that macOS probably cached it in RAM.

Interesting series of tests! Thanks for doing that. I have drawn a different conclusion than you did from your testing. While it is true that the absolute minimum amount of RAM required to boot is lower in Windows 10, if more RAM is available, Windows 10 is more aggressive in allocating it for its purposes. It's not a matter of Windows 10 being more efficient but about judiciously differentiating what is required to boot and what can be deferred (if the RAM is available). The focus of these tests were about RAM, but CPU usage also comes into play. I'd be very interested to see a follow-up video that compares Windows 7, 8, and 10 with regard to RAM, CPU usage, and storage footprint of the OS. Thanks again! definitely thumbs-up worthy. :)

In my experience Windows 10 is a lot slower on a HDD than Windows 7.

1gb is the requirement basically been the same since windows 7. 2gb minimum for actually doing anything like chrome.

i've actually had windows xp boot on 32mb of ram before, and 64mb used to be the minimum spec on the box. the main thing is service pack 3 is a lot more resource intensive than service pack 2 and before were...

Thanks for this comparison - I've found 10 to run quite well on hardware that used to run 7, and your results accurately display that plus confirm how bad Vista is against those that came before and after it!

I wonder how the same test would fare for Windows 98 and 95. 98's recommended minimum is 16 MB, and 95's is 4 MB. I wonder if you could even take 95 down to the kilobytes! Maybe 3.1 could do it

Remember, physical devices like video cards or anything else take up memory space. If this were not a VM, much of that would be used by system HW, thus requiring more RAM to even boot up. This is good, because you ARe keeping it fair, but this is the best example of "real world results will vary" :)

Love your videos, keep em coming. :D I'd like to see you do a short talk on why CD-RW and DVD-RW was common place and yet the blu-ray drive in PC's seems like missing tech.

I did the opposite and recently upgraded my computer to the maximum of 32GB for Windows 10. I was worried I wouldn't be able to use it all, but now that I've stopped trying to aggressively conserve memory all the time like I did back when I only had 8GB, I'm seeing just how easy it is to use 16-22GB without even really trying, just by opening several browser tabs, a bunch of Microsoft Office apps, maybe a few GIMP sessions, Groove music player, and perhaps Skype. The vast majority of the time, the RAM usage sits right at 50%, somehow using 16GB, but often spiking to 22GB. I've definitely seen it hit 30GB, but not often. I don't really regret my purchase. Paging was markedly slower. People still say no one needs more than 16GB, but I think they mean for gaming, and underestimate how bloated modern web pages are these days. Try having a Facebook tab, a KZfaq tab, a LinkedIn tab, a Twitter tab, and maybe a couple of news articles on a junky site full of advertisements open all at once, and you'll be shocked how fast that RAM gets gobbled up.

What was your video memory set at? Lowering the video memory may allow you to lower the overall system memory. Awesome video I love it.

My old computer has 6 GB despite being an i5 2500K and my new computer being an i7 7700K has 16 GB.

Oooh Different camera angle! I like the change up!

I love how everyone says Windows 10 is so bloated, but of the most recent OS's, it uses the least RAM, and can run on the least RAM.

Still using XP in 2018

If you had used Home Basic for Windows 7 it would have go even lower

really glad to chance into your channel. thank you for the very interesting and informative videos. "we got all sorts of the garbage and games and stuff [in the startup menu]".... :)

I like your videos but I feel that they're much longer than needed. I find that with some editing you could get them to about half as long and they would be much more enjoyable to watch. Thanks for your hard work, keep it up :)

Only because it boots with less memory it doesn't mean that the system is more usable on old computers. I have an old notebook with 1GB of ram and single core, I tried Windows 10 on and it was very slow, without drivers. I couldn't even connect to internet, because it said that there weren't available resources. On windows 8.1, it worked well, but I didn't find video drivers. On windows 7, the system worked well and the drivers worked, but most programs like browser were slow. Windows Vista, that was its original OS, was very slow and everything made it crash (I didn't test reinstalling, it was with a lot of programs). Windows XP was the fastest OS that I tested, and it worked very well. Linux debian with LXQT also worked well.

Modern ssd or nvme is very fast and its can perform well in swap file. Try hdd for storage.

Way to go Colin! You're very close to the first official milestone for your channel! 100k subs! Do you have something special planned? :D

great video , have a older laptop from 2008 that came with Vista and was starting to have a lot of issues and thought i would have to buy a new laptop but after putting clean windows 10 install on it runs better then new now and can keep with a tower PC i bought in 2015

I think you should have disabled virtual memory on all of those OSs. Also, could you do that on Mac OS? It may be one of those things that can't be directly compared, but still... I'd like to know.

Why do you find surprising that Windows 10 runs with 2GB of RAM? For x32 version MS recommends minimum of 1 GB.

I used to love Windows 7, but then I began to notice that there are things that just can't be done on 7 that work well on 10. I installed Classic Shell and a tool to disable the Ribbon in Explorer. I don't hate it so much now.

ok, am sold. subscribing to the channel now after bing watching about 10 videos :D

I would hardly call that a win for Windows 10. It just means that it loads its memory manager before the others.

I love love LOVE Windows 7! I've been using it since day one and I'm STILL not compelled to upgrade. Windows 10 rubs me the wrong way. I would perhaps like it more if I could skin it to look and behave exactly as Windows 7 does. I'm also not a huge fan the the always on connectivity to Microsoft. As for this episode, I ended up enjoying it. The virtual machine was a nice touch and I'm sure it saved you a TON of extra work than if you'd tried doing this on actual hardware.

Wow that was an interesting experiment Colin!

Usually I noticed that windows usually uses either 25%-50% of your ram depending on how mutch ram you have, for example if you have 1-2 gigs of ram ram usage is usually 50% and if your using 4 or more gigabytes of ram its usually 25% usage

For those of the more retro persuasion, here's a round-up of "RAM sweet spots" for old versions of Windows: (NOTE: These are NOT _minimum_ requirements, just my observed "no longer disk thrashing when using some apps" RAM levels) 95 liked to have at least 24MB. 98/SE preferred to have about 32-48MB. NT4 liked to have at least 64MB. 2K really needed 128MB, (brief fanboy moment: I clung to this pleasingly slimline and reliable OS for grim death until pretty much being forced to XP in the mid 00s). XP SP1 was okay with half a gig, but by SP2 really needed 768MB to be comfortable. Vista needed 128GB.... at least that's how it felt. :D

Is 4gb of ram enough for just windows 10 and Microsoft office (I need it for school work and I don’t have a lot to spend 😂) thanks

Windows 10 is made by design to run on 512 megs of RAM. That was for IOT devices (Raspberry PI), phones, embedded systems (ATMs and kiosks), and game systems(Xbox One and another system.) It will run at 256 megs. It just turn off ANY special rendering feature like scrolling. This because you may have an app you want keep in memory with affecting performance. Side Note: The 'other game system' was going to be the Dreamcast 2. A bunch or developer were petitioning Sega to let them release an updated system. They wanted to use Window 7, 8, and eventually 10's version. Windows CE was used in the original Dreamcast as the boot loader and file manager. A very very few developers made games for Windows CE on the Dreamcast 1. Sega mostly shut down the project with cease and desist orders. What was left of the team was talking about making their own system and releasing it under another name. Last I heard the project was considered dead. Here the kicker: The Dreamcast 2 was pretty much was released. It was called the Xbox. Just stay with me for a moment. The Xbox had 4 controller ports, almost identical controllers and a VMU memory card system like Dreamcast. Also Sega had a habit of basing their next generation home systems on the current generation arcade board. Sega generally just reduces the RAM and removes any custom features like communication modules for rumble seats, link cables, and flashing lights. The Sega Chihiro arcade system, what the Dreamcast 2 would have been based on, is almost identical to the Xbox. The main difference between the Chihiro arcade system and Xbox is that Xbox has less RAM. Even the chip placement and wiring are almost identical. A programmer has dumped and decrypted the Chihiro ROMs of three Sega arcade systems (Ghost Squad, Outrun 2 SP, and Virtua Cop 3) and got them to run on an Xbox with very minor memory mapping changes. Here is a more detailed video about this: kzfaq.info/get/bejne/or13nKuYucqwcpc.html

the backend is optimized on win10 but the problem is all the userspace intrusions, i.e. bloatware, sudden random updates without user consent, auto-reinstallation of software you already uninstalled, the reset of all user privacy preferences upon big updates, etc.

What? My previous laptop was struggling with 4gb ddr3 on windows 10 home

384MB on Windows 7 is like 64MB on XP I'd say

I've tried all modern versions of windows on a old laptop with 2 GB of RAM. 8.1 by far ran circles around 7 and 10. Sat at around 512 MB RAM usage at idle.

Interesting experiment as always!

hmm, 96MB for XP? that's not right at all. it can install on 64MB, and once installed it can run all the way down to 18MB... something is wrong here

Interesting results. Though I gotta comment on those mentioned W10 insults: I really don't think anyone hating on and advising people to avoid W10 really care about its "efficiency", or even its looks (though its UI design is terrible). It really has more to do with the modern business practices of Microshit itself, and how you're practically selling your soul and computer to them, "signing up for a service" rather than installing a software. And with all those OBLIGATORY updates literally breaking and bricking people's machines, or at least destroying compatibility with quite recent, mainstream applications, there's a lot of issues with W10. So many of such caliber, that I'm literally, no joke, never buying or using another MS product, if they do not make a complete 180-degree turn in the future, and back pedal a mile.

I love how the microphone was in focus the whole time and not you.

Awesome video, thanks.

Not good enought... open google and word and try to use it

You should load Edge and open a couple of sites. Play a youtube video too. Because just booting and showing the menu is not actually working

Fascinating. Love the shirt, too.

I'd love to know how to "bias" Windows 10 (and other versions) so that it uses little or no "virtual memory" before physical RAM is nearly exhausted. The memory management, even in Windows 10 is arbitrarily and needlessly using swap space too soon.

Very insightful video. Amazing to see just how much RAM Windows can still work with. While I personally won’t have that issue as I have my old motherboard maxed out with 32GB of DDR3 RAM, it’s nice to know that my smallest stick of RAM I still have, 4GB of DDR3, will still allow Windows to work even if some of my most modern games will be laggy as anything. The funniest thing of this video though: Windows be like “Imma gonna update and you can’t stop me”. 😂

Try Windows 3.11

These kinds of things are so incredibly interesting to see.

Great Video!!!

Meanwhile I wanna just watch KZfaq on a laptop with a 333mhz processor and 64mb of ram

The minimum amount of ram I got XP (32-bit) to boot with was 24mb.

I'm thinking about doing a similar thing with Linux. Would it be okay to nab a screenshot of the OS/Min memory graphic you made?

Windows XP can be taken down to a little under 40MB of RAM under service pack 3, windows 7 (if you disable some of the unneeded services) can be taken to around 70MB of RAM used, along with minimal pagefile usage. It does not page as well as other versions, but if you are willing to strip the startup, you can have lots of RAM but get the OS to use very little RAM. Even on the default settings, windows 7 is more efficient than windows 10. for example installing windows 7 on a netbook that came with windows 10, performs far more smoothly (even though some of the motherboard drivers were generics). 2GB on windows 7 is quite usable, while 2GB of windows 10 is slow.

Damn, I would have expected Windows 7 to run with 128MB, maybe 64 even 🤔

nice, but yeah.. windows is just.. WAY too demanding, personally i preffer linux where i can easily idle at less than 200mb ram

I jumped from DOS to W95 to 98 to XP to W7 and now I'm using W10. I'm also a big Linux enthusiast and since I discovered it in early 2000s

We have a few workstations at work with 512GB of ram. I think at idle with nothing running they were showing something like 24GB or 32GB of ram in use. They also have an Intel 1.2TB PCIe SSD card in them. Windows seems to scale its ram usage to what it has available. If you really want to try some tight ram usage, try Server 2012R2 Hyper-V Core and Server 2016 Hyper-V core. Both are fully free OSes to download from Microsoft. They basically have almost no GUI. The login screen is a "command prompt window" box in all text. With so little running they may go even tighter on ram.

Windows is still using 2gbs of ram. Virtual ram. Disable virtual memory and then we see windows really work hard for resource allocation

My kids computer runs windows 7 with 4 GB of ram and it works fine, my work laptop runs 10 pro and it has 8 GB of ram and works flawlessly.

Great explanation of ram vs. swap (pagefile). Not a real tech guy, but that is what I perceived it to be. Zram in linux helps lower end machines.

I have windows 7 running on a 2.2GHz Pentium 4 from around 2003, with 512MB of RAM and a 20GB IDE HDD to run my Dad's "MagicJack" phone service. It's so strange seeing a fairly modern OS on an old machine with such a noisy hard drive. To be fair I have aero and everything else imaginable turned off, and I think the system has a 128MB dedicated nVidia Quadro AGP GPU.

I laugh at the "minimum recommendation" as running minimum turtles the system and invites BSOD.

That's still bloated when you compare it to older OSs like Windows 98 or Mac OS 9 or Mac OS X panther and earlier. I've messed with all those older OSs and they are still VERY capable of doing modern tasks.

The BSOD said "Bad system info" so do you think there might be a file where there is a hard set number of minimum ram that could be changed?

the amount of ram used has to do also with the amount of page file on the disk , you can use a small ssd for paging file if you dont have enough ram

Windows 7 FOR LIFE!

Hmmm so windows 10 basically uses half of the available RAM? Well I have a 64GiB server >:) windows will have trouble using 32GiB RAM.

idk if people noticed this but the pagefile size on windows 7 was less than half the size of the one on 10, this test should be done with a disabled pagefile

I would have liked to see what previous versions would have coped with before xp. It obviously would have been ridiculously low, but would have been fun to see.

It still amazes me that Windows might be more functional on low memory devices than Android.

I thought Microsoft recommends 2 gb RAM for Windows 10...

This video got me started with my Windows XP SP3 Virtual machine, got it to boot with 32MB of RAM in safe mode with networking and Opera browser can still load pages, going to keep going lower though. UPDATE: 28MB working but now it's starting to feel slow, offline use seems alright but Opera browser is causing issues once it starts to load its UI.

This interesting phenomenon is because Windows 10 is way ahead in managing resources compared to Vista, 7 or 8. There are so many things like compression and all going around in Windows 10. If you had used any power shell scripts to clean all the blot that come with Windows 10, I am sure that it will work at memory even less. P.S. It is also interesting to note that Windows 10 may function on low ram due to above reasons, but will not install well or fast with low ram. I am sure 32 bit don't install at or below 512 MB and 64 bit below 1 gig. I tested with a 64 bit install on 1 gig of ram. Was able to get up to the part were we select language and all. Then it was stuck at just a moment.

Windows 10 is much better than people give it credit for.

Whatever Micro$oft recommends, for ram double it. I remember running Win 95 on 32 mb of ram.

Black Friday deal like over a year ago. For $90 I got RCA netbook with 2GB of RAM with 4 core Adom CPU and I play full HD KZfaq videos on it all the time.

Im not surprised about the jump from xp to vista as vista was a major version increase over xp, going from 5.x to 6.x I believe all versions from vista upwards are still 6.x underneath. I was hoping that it would go back further to see Windows versions like 2000, ME, NT4, 95, 98, 98se and so on.

You just lost my interest in this video at 1:52 What a waste...

Colon its gigabyte not gigaram please, this is making me bang my head in

A while back before I recycled my dads old PC, it had a Pentium 3, 1 gb of ram, windows 10 did boot and ran. I wasn't able to use chrome, had to install Firefox. But it did work for general use,. But I doubt it would have worked well. I gave him another PC I got from an office that was selling old hardware. It was a dell optiplex 7010, for a small formfactor PC it works well for his needs.

Enjoyed and subbed :P

I remember my first PC was an old Dell Dimension 4400, it had only 128Mb of memory, a P4 1.6Ghz processor, and a 20Gb HD. Along with a whopping 16Mb graphics card

those blue screens are because of windows fast shutdown, you have to hold shift when you click shutdown to avoid that, or disable it completely in settings

I'm using Win10 1903 x64 and it's using 15 gigs of my 32 gigs of RAM when idle. As I learnt from another video, it doesn't actually "use" it, it's just reserving it to make it available much quicker than without the reserving thing. I'm a software engineer and that makes a lot of sense to me. In general, I think, Windows 10 will always use/reserve (at least) around half of what you have, most of the time. Edit: I disabled the virtual memory. Don't know if that's a factor.

windowx xp sp2 and 7 are my favorites so far, i remember having to upgrade from xp to vista to play Halo 2 though, and vista was terrible. my gateway pc had a very old nvida gpu and a very old intel cpu my parents had bought a long ass time ago at least over 12 years since my family had it before we moved to another state, i was still able to run my all time favorite game STALKER: Shadow of Chernobyl on it from the beginning and played it for years.

That's a lot of surprises ! Can you do the same with Mac OS and Linux?

IIRC Windows XP's RAM requirements are 64mb mínimum (and a that amount you can't disable the pagefile) and 128Mb recommended. Compared tto the 512Mb minimum / 1Gb recommended for Vista it is a huge gap. Also, WinHistory did a XP minimal requirement test where they booted the OS with the bare mínimum hardware to see how low it could go (Spoiler: 18Mb for Ram and an 8Mhz CPU where the lowest)

It was great Sir, thank you for the video. ^^ I liked to see how of efficient is Windows 10. But in a real machine, the laptop of my sister, without drivers for windows 10 and with a 1GB of RAM, it was very, very limited. It's incredible that in this video looks windows 10 with less of 500Mb of RAM quite fast, but really with 1 GB of RAM, I don't feel it's enough efficient, especially when the memory is shared like virtual memory to the hard disk. Both are slow, SSD and Hard disk if we compare to RAMs, but between the hard disk and SSD can be a lot of difference, it's not the speed, is the time to time to access to one information or another. Then, it's great how much minimum memory we need to load a windows 10, but to get a good performance, it's important to take off the no necessary programs. And I am not sure that with not official drivers can be work fine old computers, especially for games.

Here is the thing: Microsoft moved Windows Phone to Windows NT kernel instead of Windows CE kernel after Windows Phone 7. That forced Windows NT to run on smaller memories found on phones, and in turn having those memory-saving technologies trickle over to the desktop side of things. While Windows Phone died, we do get the legacy of a slimmer NT kernel that is shared by desktop and console versions of Windows.