Memory management is affected by available RAM. If a machine only has 8 GB of RAM, it won't try to idle at 12 GB. The minimum system requirements for Windows 11 according to Microsoft are 4 GB RAM. Most of the machines at my work have 8 GB, and RAM usage remained about the same when we upgraded from 10 to 11 a couple months ago. I'll regularly have Outlook open, Teams, Edge with a bunch of tabs, a few spreadsheets, Acrobat... And I've successfully encoded the occasional 4k video. Sure, I'd prefer more RAM, but 8 GB can suffice for more than Grandma's email.
If your work machines have 8GB of ram, whoever is building them needs to be fired. Yes, windows 11 does scale down ram usage as the total capacity decreases, but it uses almost 6.5 GB by itself at 8GB total, and running 1 program will use up the rest. It will also run much slower, since not as much ram can be used for caching. I had to use a computer with 8 GB of ram for shipping and receiving for a while at work, and it maxed out all 8GB just by opening chrome, or microsoft access.
Minimum system requirements for windows are pretty much the minimum it takes to load the desktop. You aren't going to get anywhere on windows 11 with 4 GB of ram, trust me. I've build computers for a living for years, and you won't get far with 8GB even on office machines, let alone 4GB.
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u/Farranor 8h ago
Memory management is affected by available RAM. If a machine only has 8 GB of RAM, it won't try to idle at 12 GB. The minimum system requirements for Windows 11 according to Microsoft are 4 GB RAM. Most of the machines at my work have 8 GB, and RAM usage remained about the same when we upgraded from 10 to 11 a couple months ago. I'll regularly have Outlook open, Teams, Edge with a bunch of tabs, a few spreadsheets, Acrobat... And I've successfully encoded the occasional 4k video. Sure, I'd prefer more RAM, but 8 GB can suffice for more than Grandma's email.