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Posted by akyuu 17 hours ago

Windows 11's built-in Weather app wastes more than 1 GB of RAM(www.notebookcheck.net)
484 points | 400 commentspage 6
Wowfunhappy 15 hours ago|
...you know, I keep reading all this stuff about memory prices, and it does suck, but memory is still much cheaper per gigabyte than it was ~15 years ago.

Which matters because the things most consumers are doing on their computers haven't changed in the past 15 years. We browse the web, edit photos, message friends, and so on. AI generally runs on remote servers anyway.

For years, everyone kept saying it was fine that Electron used gigabytes of memory, because on modern PCs memory was plentiful anyway. Well, it's not plentiful anymore! Maybe it's time software developers actually used resources efficiently?

Hey, you even have an LLM to help you now!

AnotherGoodName 15 hours ago||
But it's literally not cheaper than it was ~15 years ago? Right now RAM is the same price per GB as it was in 2007 and prices per GB look to continue to rise.

https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/ram/scientist-say...

ttoinou 15 hours ago|||
Nobody would like to use DDR3 right now though, you can get cheap DDR3 DDR2 if you want some
trinix912 3 hours ago||
It physically will not fit a modern motherboard.
gruez 15 hours ago|||
>Right now RAM is the same price per GB as it was in 2007 and prices per GB look to continue to rise.

...when looking at nominal prices (ie. not adjusted for inflation). If you adjust for that the furthest back you can go to get that price is 2011. What's more is that because RAM prices are subject to boom and bust cycles, that price has also been reached in 2015. So just by tweaking two parameters we went from 19 years (2007) to 11 years (2015).

adrian_b 14 hours ago||
That is correct, DDR5 today is in real US$ slightly cheaper than DRAM was in 2011, 15 years ago.

For more than 15 years in the past, the price in real US$ of DRAM per GB was always higher than today.

During 2014, there was a brief price peak when DDR3 (the standard current then) was slightly more expensive than DDR5 is today.

Still, the fact that now the price per GB is the same as 15 years ago, is bad enough, and it can still become worse.

Dylan16807 14 hours ago|||
We had modern programming toolkits that traded some efficiency for ease of use 20 years ago, along with GPU compositing for maximum smoothness. And that's when Vista came out requiring a whole 1GB to run properly. And other than doubling for 64GB that didn't change through 7, 8, 8.1, 10.

Electron was never a great idea but more and more basic things keep moving to it and the result is a disaster. When you use it for several little things at once it turns from annoying waste into massive waste.

baist0 12 hours ago||
moder engineers.
kasabali 15 hours ago|||
15 years ago 4GB was comfortable and 8GB was abundant.

Today 8GB is bare minimum.

drnick1 9 hours ago|||
The sad thing is that usability of computers has not improved. More RAM has bought us absolutely nothing when it comes to UI/UX.
Wowfunhappy 11 hours ago|||
Exactly, isn't that nuts? Especially when we're now paying 15-years-ago prices per gigabyte. What are we getting for that additional space?
baist0 12 hours ago|||
You are destroying the subtle mechanism of corporate enrichment.
hinkley 15 hours ago||
But we went from 1080p monitors to 5k monitors and so we are pushing 7x the number of pixels and at roughly twice the bits per pixel.
turpentine 6 hours ago|||
51% of people are still on 1080p according to the July 2026 steam survey.
Wowfunhappy 14 hours ago|||
True, but I don't really think that accounts for the increase in memory usage.
hinkley 14 hours ago||
No but it's the biggest one that's easy to forget.

Feature factory work increases the surface area of every API you touch, and the proliferation of pre-written APIs expands the number of APIs you touch. The combination of the two is not quite O(n²) but the exponent is more than 1, so it's still geometric.

3dedb728-3f77 12 hours ago||
What if we make all these apps obsolete with < 1mb options.

100 tools < 100mb.

reddalo 46 minutes ago||
I miss lightweight tools so much. Even on Linux, opening some apps feels slow and sluggish, maybe because of Snap or Flatpak containerization, I don't know.
leduyquang753 3 hours ago||
That only nerds will use because the UI is only ASCII art on a black terminal screen?
trinix912 3 hours ago||
Have you never used fully native software? All UI code is in the system DLLs that are already loaded with the OS so you can have a nice GUI program with no fuss and no extra memory requirements besides the little code your app requires. See Nirsoft utilities for an example.
gruturo 8 hours ago||
In the era of coding with frontier LLMs, it should take Microsoft 20 junior engineers, a couple seniors, a token budget and a month or two to fix most of this shit by building lean, native apps. Given that they can obviously spare this kind of resourcing, I truly wonder why they won't. Not that I give a crap - removed the last windows machine from my home ages ago at this point.
UltraSane 10 hours ago||
I have 64GB of DDR5 Ram and a 64GB pagefile on a pcie 5 SSD and window 11 still runs like crap.
Zopieux 9 hours ago||
What's the status on automatic debloating (non interactive) scripts for Windows these days? With vibe coding I'd expect hundreds of those to exist by now. Something everyone would run after a clean install, to revert, disable or uninstall all the stupid defaults and enshitifications Microsoft added in the past decades.

Anyone can recommend one of those?

jaimex2 5 hours ago||
Microslop strikes again
undebuggable 14 hours ago||
An app which could have been a website.
Scharkenberg 10 hours ago||
It is literally the MSN Weather website packaged as a WebView2 app.
superjan 13 hours ago|||
I don’t know if this is sarcastic. A lot of bloat in GUI apps is because they are built as websites with a bloated front end, dependencies, custom fonts plus the binary compiled code and the decompressed images cached by the browser.
perching_aix 14 hours ago||
Is it not?

> Instead, it is essentially an MSN Weather web app built on Microsoft's WebView2 framework. Task Manager shows multiple Chromium-based subprocesses running simultaneously, which contributes to the unusually high RAM usage.

sciencesama 5 hours ago||
how to disable it ?
martheen 48 minutes ago|
Search for it in the Start menu, right click uninstall. You can do the same with most other preloaded apps, or use whatever powershell incantation to do it in batch.
baist0 13 hours ago||
This is what traditions mean!
pixel_popping 14 hours ago|
Anything above 50MB RAM for this is shameful imo and reflect poor engineering.
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