> I would love to see Windows not take up 4 gigs of RAM out of the box. Let me uninstall Cortana please Microsoft. I'm sure there's other crap I don't want but I fear if I can't just hit 'Uninstall' it wont go well, or an update will bring it back.

So much misinformation in this and the replies that address this. Windows needs a minimum of 2GB RAM to run. But it scales its memory footprint according to the available memory. It will instantly swap this out when a demanding application is launched. For reference, on my Thinkpad with 8GB of RAM, Windows idles at about 3GB. On my PC with 16GB, it idles at around 7.5GB.

For reference, (with a Windows 10 system with 16GB of RAM) after several hours of light use, task manager reports that 2.7GB of RAM is used with 13GB available (other numbers report that 3.3/16.9GB are committed, and 2.8GB cached).

That is strange do you have any further points of reference on the matter? Preferrably a resource from Microsoft if possible.

You can verify some of this by examining a lot of the running memory bloat in https://live.sysinternals.com/procexp.exe (official diagnostics tool by sysinternals, a microsoft subsidiary), just make sure to elevate to see full process info with 'show details on all processes'.

On my machine a bunch of UWP apps are loaded passively in the background. A few are UWP apps I use occasionally, a few aren't. I don't know what heuristic they use for this. You might look at that and go - hey, wasted memory and CPU! However:

These apps are fully suspended, so they can't use any CPU at all. You can observe this in the procexp CPU column. Because they are fully suspended the OS can also instantly evict them when it detects memory pressure, similar to how the page caching system in OSes retains cached file contents in scratch memory to speed up I/O - if the memory used for caching files is needed for applications, the cache will be evicted to make space. Cortana, for example, is using 180mb of RAM for me right now but it is fully suspended so it can be evicted immediately to make room for another app. The upside is that when I hit start and begin typing Cortana search responds immediately.

The downside to this automatic eviction setup for background apps is that they will show up in memory usage statistics even though they're not really tying up that memory. It makes your system's available RAM a bit misleading. There are other modern apps that also respond to memory pressure - I believe Firefox will automatically compact its memory, you can manually trigger that in about:memory to see what it does.

I can also confirm that increasing the amount of RAM in my machine increased how much of it Windows was willing to use for preloading apps and caching pages, but I feel like that's not surprising.

Doesn’t this become an issue when your memory intensive apps close? Because after being evicted, wouldn’t Cortana and all the other stuff need a second to be reloaded into memory?

Yes, but the effect is the same as if files were evicted from the page cache: They get reloaded from disk when next used. Better for cortana to take an extra 750ms to load than for your other app to run out of memory.

Linux does the same thing, they both use RAM to cache disk reads for performance.

The tools on both generally show cache as free. The issue is not somebody misreading a chart.

If it was cache then the use would appear to be 98%

Win10 runs like crap on 2GB. They only support it to appease the bottom end of the market and stave off the threat of alternative low cost platforms.

Is there any way to tell it to use up less or more RAM? It would be very dumb if this weren't configurable

But why would you want you RAM to sit unused? The OS uses all the RAM available for caching if nothing else wants it for something more important.

Are memory-heavy applications able to detect true available memory? I could see an app that tries to scale itself to available memory running with reduced performance or refusing to run if it sees non-page-cache but evictable memory as unavailable.

You are over complicating.

In general applications don't manage their ram usage based on available resources they just take what they need until your system starts swapping.

The OS manages memory and evicts cache to make use for applications when they request it. The good thing about a cached file is that it is available on disk to be reread any time you like.

I've used applications that will specifically allocate (available memory * x) or similar because they or their plugins can't handle ENOMEM or the Windows equivalent, and they do not want to swap.

Those applications were broken anyways, see https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20120118-00/?p=85...

Isn't that basically what browsers do these days?

If you can't answer this question for yourself, why do you think you'd be capable of modifying the factory default? Memory management is one of the most complex pieces of a modern OS

The biggest WTF was Cortana . . . running by default on Windows Server.

I have no idea what they were thinking. Yes, you can disable it with a policy editing. For a server product, you shouldn't have to.

It's unsurprising to me that *nix systems are the majority on Azure. It is surprising to me that enterprise shops still commission new Windows servers at all in $current_year.

In supporting the enterprise, pretty much every application I deal with is unfortunately "Windows Only". Accounts tends to be managed by MYOB, Quickbooks or in the large firms, Accountants Office (also a MYOB product). All these ship with Windows services, Attache being particularly offensive as it has "known issues" with clients on Windows 8.1 or higher. Pay is often Payglobal or NAV, which again is Windows.

The closest I had was a LexisNexis product that used to run on a Linux server - until our account manager told us they were dropping Linux because, and I quote, "Linux has too many security problems". I've supported two different EMR (medical) products, and at least five different POS products, all Windows only. Even when we get a SaaS product running in a web browser, half the time it's "IE only".

I'd give a lot to live in the type of organisation without this legacy.

Wow, that seems like an insane choice as the default.

I'm curious what the rationale was behind that choice.

Tinfoil theory incoming: NSA pressures windows to have the largest attack surface possible by default. With the hope that any given targeted system will have at least one piece of default bloatware still running, presumably they have 0-days for most all of them.

Even putting aside the tinfoil hat. The NSA would never pressure anyone to have a larger attack surface, that would just make it easier for competing nations and attackers to discover flaws, which would render their own efforts moot

They have compromised crypto standards in the past, but we can't use that to justify every conspiracy theory without evidence.

if Russia discovers how to hack Cortana and keeps it private, that in no way impinges on NSA's ability to use the same hack to compromise, say, an Iranian system. The more possible avenues for attack, the better (for attackers).

Windows 2003 Server had sound system disabled in default installation. How things change...

Server 2012 had touch screen support. I can think of many things I'd rather have than touch screen support.

How about decent support for two-factor domain login?

Priorities, guys. (Please don't get me started about the special circle of hell that is deploying Windows. It truly is a misery).

Server 2019 also has the sound service disabled and doesn't come with Cortana either, just windows search.

Windows will grow to fill the available RAM and will also release it when there is memory pressure

Lots of people install 8 or 16 GBs and complain about how much Windows consumes but if you remove RAM, Windows will happily operate at under 50% utilization in 4 or 6 GB situations.

Hah, indeed. "An all knowing colleague" suggested in Slack to use DisableWinTracking* tool for greater privacy and security. I had already done the most of the usual privacy enhancing stuff manually to Windows 10, but decided to try if the tool would know something more. Some weeks later IT realized there are several desktops in our domain which stopped installing Windows updates on a same day. And some administration tool couldn't reach those computers anymore. Basically we ended up wasting about 20-30 man hours on getting those desktops to function properly again without reinstalling.

*) https://github.com/10se1ucgo/DisableWinTracking

I can echo this. On a security assessment I found an organisation was a long way behind in Windows Updates. I eventually tracked this to the AppReadiness service being disabled, which someone thought was a cool debloat option. The end result is that machines just claim to be up to date despite not being.

> I would love to see Windows not take up 4 gigs of RAM out of the box.

It... doesn't? I feel like last time I tried it was less than 2? Did you only install Windows or a ton of other things too?

This is what it looks like "out of the box" after disabling memory compression and the pagefile: https://imgur.com/a/D5b8bk5

I run Windows 10 on a 10 year old htpc with 3gb ram. Leaves enough memory to run a few background services and kodi with zero problems.

Exactly. People get mad when things on their system are using the memory they purchased. The only problem is when it's actually using the memory and Windows starts dying because other programs aren't freeing up enough memory.

Same thing for chrome - often people say "chrome eats your RAM" but it's just being as efficient as it can be - if your OS asks it to free ram, it will and 8GB of webpages can go down to 4GB at the expense of getting rid of cached "back" pages and other cached memory.

The problem is, that at least in my experience chrome never does that. Which is why I recently had only 5g "available" (not free), and it was all swap, because Chrome had been a degenerate example of resource mismanagement on all of my computers since it was first released. I have yet to see Chrome free memory in way other than murdering the render process myself or closing the tabs and hoping it wasn't a shared process one, at least on Linux.

I'm curious, how does the OS tell Chrome to free memory? Because as far as I know, there's no API to check if another program needs memory.

On Windows 10? I closed everything except Firefox (and this HN tab), which is taking up 600MB of RAM, and now it's at 4.6GB of RAM. Before with two instances of GoLand, Slack and Discord open it was over at 8GB of RAM.

On a Windows 10 VM set to 2 GB of RAM, Windows idles at about 1.1 GB.

On a 16 GB Windows it uses about 7.5 GB. All of that seems to swap out or go away somewhere if I get busy with Visual Studio.

On a 64 GB Windows it seems to idle at about 9.6 GB used. Of course, this one isn't a purely work machine and has Steam, Origin, Ubisoft's thing, etc, etc.

So Windows 10 is pretty variable. I imagine it has something to do with running various services in parallel.

What quantity are you measuring that's 7.5 GB... and what else do you have on that machine? I quit Chrome on my current machine which has a bunch of other stuff and has no less RAM than yours, and even then I was left with <4GB of anything I could regard as usage. It can't possibly be just Windows itself idling at 7.5 GB?

Except my system has 16GB and it idles at 4GB. My old system with 8GB idles at 4GB even my system at home with 16GB idles at 4GB. I dont understand why it would idle at 8GB.

Yeah, on Windows 10. You probably have a lot more running than what would be running "out of the box"...

4gb does seem excessive. Win10 is using closer to 2gb right now on my system. Chrome and Firefox, both doing very little, are taking 1gb together by comparison.

I'd imagine it caches more if you have more ram

I've got 256GB and a fresh install of windows use about 4 with a few things running on startup(mostly just the amd+nvidia drivers). There is indeed some scaling with availability but with diminishing returns after probably 8/16gb of available ram.

What I find more interesting is that windows still compresses and swaps on startup even with that much ram available.

Disable swap (pagefile) when you have that much ram, or even when you only have 8 or more. You lose hibernate but that's fine by me. Modern cpu and ssd cold boots pretty fast, especially if you have debloated things similar to this script.

Many of the things that are pitched as beneficial, like indexing everything and caching the indexes and keeping all kinds of services alive to "quick start" other things in case you happen to want them, hibernation or sleeping instead of cold boot, etc, these are all cases of adding more crap to counter the harm from previously adding other crap.

Instead of adding foofeature you don't really need, and then adding foofeatureaccelerator to try to disguise the overhead of foofeature, you can just remove both foofeature AND foofeatureaccelerator, and everything is better.

Less total software to break or misbehave or serve as a security opening. Smaller disk footprint. Fewer running processes. Less ram/disk/net resources consumed. Less telemetry. Simpler total system for you to manage, and maybe actually have a hope in hell of grasping more of what all is going on with one human head. More of your resources available for the apps and services YOU actually want, whatever they are.

Whoever wants Pandora, they can totally have it without it coming pre-bundled. If I want Pandora, I would rather install it than find it already built in. In fact, I DO want Pandora, but in fact, I use a 3rd party open source unofficial player. So even though I use it, it's still wrong for it to be built in.

If you use UWP, don't disable swap. Ever. They are 100% reliant and you'll have problems, even if you have a lot of RAM.

Reason? UWP apps will always suspend if you minimize, for example. They move that to swap. It was basically made for swap.

Thanks for all the advice!

This is my compute "cluster" and I don't usually have windows running on it, just tossed it on there do some bios modifications to my compute cards.

I just thought I would provide some insight to the conversation!

You don't lose hibernate by disabling swap... they're entirely separate.

I've tested with a lot of RAM.

I have a cheap HP convertable laptop/tablet with 2GB of RAM, Windows 10 works fine on it.

I learned to love the defaults on everything and its liberating.

Every time a new major update comes out, I do a clean install, put on Office, Visual Studio and a couple of apps and I'm good to go.

Heh I feel you, when a new Ubuntu comes out sometimes I just fresh install just cause you never know, though I have upgraded in the past. If you install Ubuntu and then want a new Desktop Environment, it doesn't feel quite right, because the original install defined defaults that the new DE isn't setting itself for / against.

On Windows I don't reformat anymore like I used to, and I used to reformat a lot because I would disable "useless" Windows services to save on RAM (back when I had 3GB of RAM, and then 8GB). When I stopped doing that, my OS was working fine for years and years.

This is why I use Manjaro. DE keeps updating as does everything else; no reinstalls required.

I agree to a degree.

I like the approach of Arch. I do a clean install, add the applications that I want, and leave virtually all of the settings at their defaults. In one respect it is a highly customized system since the installed software is tailored to my needs. On the other hand, I am not spending time tweaking settings.

When I use systems where the vendor installs a lot of software by default (it doesn't matter whether it's another Linux distribution or Windows), I am easily annoyed by how much stuff gets in my way visually or in terms of performances. That leaves me with an intense desire to debloat. I try to resist the urge, but am usually unsuccessful.

I've started embracing the defaults too. At least, when I can stand them. Having to spend all day configuring an OS is not great. I love the freedom of being able to settle into any workstation and feel comfortable with it.

I learned to love progress bars and its liberating.

Every time I need to get something done, I can instead look at a progress bar slowly filling up.

Yuuuup. I ran into an issue where it became completely impossible to install a .net redistributable. Basically every possible method I found to install it would fail silently. So my computer became incapable of playing a ton of video games.

The thing that amazes me is just how much more bloated Windows 10 has become, compared to e.g. Vista. Even modern Linux won't really run all that well (on a desktop workload) with less than 1GB of installed RAM, but if you have that much it's incredibly snappy and smooth. Every time I have to use Windows 10 I just don't find it usable, and OS X also has its issues.

1903 decoupled cortana from search. I would have her or just deleted the executable a long time ago, but they had them bundled. Now, I can do that, no issues.

I have a small Windows 10 Intel NUC that I use for Visual Studio to pull code to test and debug.

I did tweak it by removing many packages with:

Get-AppxPackage | Select Name, PackageFullName

Remove-AppxPackage ...

I also did tweak the group policies to prevent Windows 10 for many things, such as not use Cortana and not to auto-update and restart without notice. The software I write needs to run for weeks without leaks, that's one of the things I need to test on that system.

That NUC computer running Windows 10 is a pure joy to use. Once trimmed down Windows boots in seconds and never interrupt me while I am working.

The Group Policy Editor (gpedit.msc) contains most of the important settings to disable (Cortana, having your searches uploaded to Bing, Windows Update, Defender...) and it's perfectly safe to use, unlike these scripts.

The problem with gpedit is it is clickily thingy. Its pain to find something and setup. Pwsh all the way.

Aren't there PS functions to modify GP?