Microsoft itself accidentally proves Windows 11 minimum system requirements make no sense

Microsoft's 8GB Surface Laptop exposes Windows 11's true need for 16GB RAM, despite lower official requirements.

Back in December of 2025, Microsoft published its official recommendation and guidance list of hardware, specifically gaming. At the time, the company said that 16GB of RAM is plenty for most gamers, while 32 GB was deemed the ideal choice.

Also, the minimum system requirements for Windows 11, even in 2026, remain the same, with devices required to have just 4GB of RAM, though Microsoft did raise it to 16GB for its AI PCs. Thus, for a non-Copilot PC and a non-gaming PC, an 8GB Windows 11 PC should do pretty well, at least on paper, given that it easily fulfills the minimum requirements.

However, that is far from the truth, as Microsoft itself has inadvertently proven. The company recently released a 2026 refresh of its Surface Laptop with 8GB of memory, which previously packed 16GB.

The Verge took it for a test ride, and according to the report, the device did pretty poorly in its new, downgraded state. The outlet notes that even when there was a slight bit of load on the device, the performance was really poor and sluggish, compared to the 16GB variant, and this difference was mostly due to the memory being a massive bottleneck and not down to the processor or drive or anything else.

Even with just a few apps open right after a reboot, which is quite typical of most Windows laptops after a startup, the Surface Laptop was seen consuming 4.2 GB of memory. Of course, plenty of it remains cached, but once you start breaking and chipping blocks away from the cached portion, Windows devices can really, really slow down.

And that means if you are on an 8GB Windows PC, you will be severely handicapped since you probably won't be able to open more than a few browser tabs, can't install too many extensions, or can't game anything other than pre-2015 titles.

To an extent, Windows 11 requirements, like those for CPU, have never made much sense outside of security aspects, and now in 2025-26, it seems like the 4GB memory thing is also proving pointless. As always, though, there are expectations of improvement, given that on occasions modern Windows 11 has proved to be plenty fast.

Via: The Verge

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Posted Saturday 18 July 2026 at 7:31 am AEST (my time).

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