Between Windows 11 and Chrome. I had 8gb RAM on my wife's PC and with my wife jist running those two had 3gb left. Chrome was using 3Gb alone and there were 4 tabs open. My brain hurt trying to figure that out. I went through disabling all manner of startup processes and services. Helped a little, but not with Chrome. I finally just upgraded to 16gb. She doesn't like full reinstalls (use the damn share folder on the server and don't worry about lost files. Yes, it is mapped, it has your name and is only 1 of the three drives listed. At least backup the important ones so I won't have to pray Recuva works)

At a repair cafe, just saw someone with a chunky Dell Inspiron laptop that had a built-in modem and phone jack (!), which dates it to late 2000s (I believe), and I was impressed how fast Windows 10 was on it compared to newer cheap laptops.

Haven’t the foggiest. It’s not fair, because it’s a work computer, but at work, have to run windows. It has 16gb of ram, which windows and stupid spying programs or whatever use more than half. Like 9gb, possibly more.

Insane! At home, I have Linux and my 16 gb there feels totally different. At work? Stifling! Needs 32! At home, tons of overhead, I could get more but why, the only time I even come close to needing more, I’m already up to weird things, so it’s understandable.

Real

I just replaced the HDD with an SSD and installed Pop!_OS on my partner’s 12-13 year old Levovo with a backup boot to Windows 10 LTSC IoT and it’s still running like a champion! It could use another 8GB RAM but both video cards in it are recognized by both Linux and Windows!

23 year old thinkpad with 2GB DDR here. I went for antix. My greatest pleasure was putting in an m.2 ssd in an ide adapter.

It took me months to find ram that actually worked.