TL;DRMicrosoft will optimise Windows for 8GB devices as RAM costs spike and Copilot+ PCs require 16GB most buyers cannot afford
Microsoft is making it a priority to shrink the Windows memory footprint so the operating system runs well on machines with just eight gigabytes of RAM. Pavan Davuluri, President of Windows and Devices, wrote in a blog post that the company is working on “reducing Windows memory footprint to deliver a fast and responsive Windows experience across the PCs customers use every day.” The announcement comes as a global memory shortage has quadrupled RAM costs, pushing even budget laptops toward price points that most consumers cannot reach.
The technical approach involves three pieces: a more efficient memory allocator inside Windows itself, performance tuning for WinUI 3 (the framework behind modern Windows apps), and efficiency improvements for Chromium and WebView2, the browser engine that underpins Edge and dozens of other applications. None of these changes will make 8GB machines feel like 16GB ones, but Microsoft is betting that trimming overhead at the operating system level can keep older and cheaper hardware usable for longer.
The timing matters because Microsoft has spent the past year pushing Copilot+ PCs, a hardware tier that requires a neural processing unit capable of 40 trillion operations per second and a minimum of 16GB of RAM. That specification effectively locked out every budget machine on the market. The company has already started walking back its AI ambitions on cheaper hardware, making Copilot uninstallable after only three percent of users opted to pay for it, and shipping watered-down Surface laptops with 8GB of RAM that carry no Copilot+ branding.
