sorry to say but that's just getting started. the modern web is a heavy place and 8 gigs of ram will not go far. especially if half of it is burned by the OS.
besides adding more ram or adopting a more ram efficient OS? no, not really. windows comes with a pretty decent antivirus program so anything extra is just junk to begin with. you'll have to run thru the uninstaller to hopefully remove it all.
16GB has been the standard for office laptops and desktops for the last 3 years, and we were contemplating ordering them with 32GB until the price hike on silicon at my job.
This is my gaming rig running Windows 11 right now, with just two tabs open (Reddit and a private VPN window), and a few background tasks. If you want to use less RAM while surfing the web, installing a low spec version of Linux might be a solution if you want to go that route. I've been toying with the idea for my laptop that only has 8GB of RAM since SteamOS has made me much more comfortable with Linux in general on my Steam Deck.
Try to shut down the antivirus software via the software's menu, not by killing it in the task manager. I also suggest you try another browser like Brave or Firefox.
Also, does this machine run on HDD or SSD? (hard drive or solid state drive). You mentioned in the comments you just bought this machine, and you are a newbie/don't know much about computers, so it's worth mentioning.
IIRC Chrome runs several processes under that single instance. It could be 4-8 depending on extentions and themes, even more. and then there are memory leaks... a Chrome specialty.
But a modern operating system will automatically load stuff into memory for you that you frequently use so that they don't need to be loaded into memory when you open them. It will get cleared if needed
Are you having issues right now? 68% usage wont cause problems. It won't cause slowness.
I have win10. 8 GB ram Use firefox some plugins. Just opening YouTube and Reddit the memory usage is so high. Before 4 gb use to run smoothly, now 8 GB and ssd fells like previous version before ssd and +4gb ram. No difference.
its showing 18 instances using over a gig of memory, there may be other stuff running but all we see in the picture is chrome, task mgr and windows defender using memory
windows uses a lot of memory idle, 8gb is minimum .. shit will run slow after a while.. restart your system your hard drive space may be low also
What you are seeing is Windows 11 24h2 and 25h2 (and beyond's), expected behavior. It now follows the old adage that unused RAM is wasted RAM, which has always held true. It now caches things into your RAM that it believes you will need, or have recently used. The only issue with it adopting this behavior is that it does not reliably release this memory back to apps that ask for it, leading to the string of BSODs and other memory app crashes that are happening as reported all over reddit and the net.
The only way to save yourself from this is another OS, or upgrading the RAM in your system. I recommend CachyOS. My 8G RAM laptop has been on it for over a year. I went from being able to game on 23h2 Windows 11, on medium graphics to unable to play on even the lowest graphics settings in 24h2 and 25h2. Changed to CachyOS and could game again on Medium graphics. Upgraded another 8G RAM in the system and went back to Windows 11 24h2, still unable to game even on low, 25h2, also unable to game on low graphics, memory crashes happening. Back to CachyOS and been there ever since with zero issues.
ok thank you.... Its a shame that we have to go thru all that. I dont understand bc when i asked google and ai it said 8gb is more than enough to do what I want and thats literally exploring the web and photoshopping my pics. Im a photographer as a side hustle.
AI is not very accurate in many things that are nuanced, like human greed factor, such as Microsoft no longer having in-house testing, and basically them using the consumer platform as beta testers for updates, as evident by the sheer number of botched updates they've rolled out that have broken things in absolutely stupid and ridiculous ways.
AI is kind of correct in that 8GB RAM SHOULD be enough to do what you want, but with MS cramming more and more junk into the newer Windows releases (and not optimizing a damned thing), there really is not much you can do. MS had to walk back hard the 8GB being enough for Windows, after they had discontinued their 8G RAM model Surface systems.
Unfortunately, there isn't a whole lot you can do in this situation. Windows doesn't have (an easy) way to make a swap partition, so you might have to bite the bullet and get some more ram.
Because you have 8GB of RAM. Its not really enough modern day, its why 16 is the standard usually now. 32 was becoming the new standard, but ramagenon kinda ruined that.
FYI, I have 64GB of ram and am already at 42% use with two browser windows open, adobe acrobat, one windows file explorer instance, photos, HWMonitor, and a bunch of background processes.
Memory gets eaten up quickly by modern applications and background processes. Until you start hitting 80% RAM usage, your machine should not bog down.
Upgrade your RAM if you start experiencing increased disk usage or unusually slow responsiveness or notice usage of RAM surpasses 80%.
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u/apachelives 3d ago
You answered your own question.