The build has added a new separate “System Components” section in the Windows 11 Settings under the “System” menu. When one launches this System Components option, all the system applications appear under this section.
This is a nice change, as it will make it easier to remove some of the garbage that comes with Windows.
Ah, yes. Phone Link is 16 kb. Sure. The exact same size as a single disk sector.
(It’s just a shortcut.)
I was watching someone show off Playstation 2 Linux the other day. It has to run in just 32MB of memory, so you can’t do much. It would probably kernel panic at the site of any modern webpage, what with all the trackers and other embedded scripts.
But it got me thinking; this is the system that brought you games like Grand Theft Auto San Andreas, with a huge open world, where you can go from one end of the map to the other without having any load screens. The idea that we can’t have a usable desktop system in a machine capable of this, is pretty surprising. Of course, not for professional CG work, but for general web browsing use/doing schoolwork/watching videos online. If a machine like that can run San Andreas, it should be capable of these very basic tasks, even now. But the software industry had other ideas. lol
kbd,
As you said, any modern content will not fit into “retro” computing resource boundaries.
Back in the day, watching a video on the PC was an event on itself. MPEG would not even decode on the CPU, so we would have special codecs like Sorenson to watch movie trailers. Not full movies, but just trailers. And that was most likely an overnight download using the modem.
Today, a simple video is 8-10GB or more. Everything from fonts to website icons have much higher fidelity. Instead of 16×16 4 bit bitmaps, we have 256×256 full color images. Instead of simple raster fonts, we have much better looking typograpy designs with turing complete languages behind them. And putting everything together on a (dual) 4K display using composition also takes a large tool.
Yes, the machine can still run Windows 95 (with some effort). But it will be extremely limited. Even your RAM cannot be used over 4GB. In practice it will start heavily swapping things back to disk after you use only 256MB or so (that is roughly what it was optimized for).
(For a real modern clean desktop, I would recommend trying Raspberry PI 400, the “keyboard” form factor. I works, but then you get to appreciate those “wasteful” ones with 64GB of RAM)
The software of today is optimized for the hardware of today. If you took a browser that worked in 32 MB with head room for other apps and put it on a new system it would work. However, it wouldn’t be as fast. The browser uses additional memory /cpu threads to do background tasks, load and compose the page in parallel, hold more tabs open, etc, etc. Using memory is more efficient than not using it. It does become a tragedy of the commons, where every large app wants to use all the memory at times. And yes for sure, many aps could be optimized there is a lot of bloat ( code that doesn’t 100% need to be there and acts to slow down the app) in some apps which is just a modern price developers and users have agreed to pay.
It would be awesome if apps could configure themselves to optimally act on any given hardware/memory availability, and to be fair some of them try to do that, but its hard and there is only so much the browser vendors are willing to invest.
Bill Shooter of Bul Gold Supporter,
Yes, the saying is “I paid for the RAM, and I want it to be used”
As for configuring for all sizes and setups, it is a very tall order. And might even need some recompilation / JIT, or at least loading from multiple binary options
(I definitely need that edit button)
Funny how the popup message implies that Microsoft Edge is not a verified, safe app.