Microsoft says Windows 11 will run great on 8GB. It won't say how great.

Cheap laptops are shipping with 8GB of RAM again. Memory prices climbed through this year, manufacturers responded the way manufacturers do, and the entry-level machine in a shop window is back to the amount of memory that made people miserable a decade ago. Which is the context for what Mark Linton, Microsoft's corporate vice president for Windows and Devices, said at IFA in Berlin: "We're optimizing so that 8 gig of RAM runs great on machines as well."

He also claimed "significant gains on things like boot time, Windows Hello responsiveness" and said the company is "continuing to improve on the fundamentals". What he did not offer was a single number. No seconds saved at startup, no megabytes freed, no before-and-after. Take it as a direction of travel rather than a result.

The underlying work is real enough, and Microsoft has been describing it since the spring. The target is idle memory: a Windows 11 machine with 8GB installed can sit at close to 6GB used before you open anything at all. A big contributor is WebView2, the Chromium engine that a surprising number of Windows components and apps quietly run inside, and the fix is to move those pieces onto the lighter WinUI framework instead. File Explorer's Properties dialog has already made that trip. The rest is meant to arrive gradually through the end of 2026, mostly in Insider builds first.

If you are on 8GB now, the thing that helps today is not an update. It is finding out what has appointed itself to start with Windows and sit in memory doing nothing useful. Tendvane's Safety check lists the programs setting themselves to launch at startup, which on a small machine is usually where the missing memory went.