Microsoft has a pretty strict set of requirements for running Windows 11 on a computer. You need a relatively modern CPU (especially at the time of the original release back in 2021), a TPM, and at least 4GB of RAM, which is double what Windows 10 required for x64 editions of the OS.

Recently, we wrote about running Windows 11 on an unsupported CPU and we found that it works fine, but that's actually not too surprising. After all, a lot of CPUs were excluded for unclear reasons, not because of a lack of power. BUt what about the RAM requirement? Does Windows 11 really need 4GB to function? I decided to find out and install the operating system on a computer with just 2GB of RAM, and see what it's like to use it. The results? Well, they're a bit mixed.

Using a virtual machine

Finding real hardware is complicated

I wanted my test to be focused mostly on the amount of RAM in my computer, but these days, finding a computer with 2GB of RAM that doesn't also have other barriers to running Windows 11 is kind of impossible. I was willing to work around that to an extent, but even then, it was impossible for me to find real hardware that would be usable. A friend offered a laptop from 2002, but without support for PopCnt, this computer wouldn't be able to boot up Windows 11, regardless of any workarounds.

So I had to turn to virtual machines. I also didn't want to do this because, with real hardware, it's easy enough to use Rufus to create a bootable drive that disables the 4GB requirement (along with others), but with a VM, I was using the ISO directly to boot, so I couldn't do that. Instead, I just went through the installation process with the VM configured with 4GB of RAM, then turned off the machine, changed it to 2GB, and went through the OOBE and stated using the computer that way. I'd say that's close enough, and using a VM does have the benefit of ensuring that the RAM limitation is the only thing really affecting performance. Otherwise, this is a decently capable computer that should have no trouble running Windows 11.

I did use the usual trick to bypass signing in with a Microsoft account, as all the upsells, ads, and features that rely on it would probably make the experience even worse on this lower-end hardware.

Is it usable?

Not nearly as bad as I thought

I went into this experiment kind of expecting a terrible experience using Windows 11, especially considering the overhead of running the operating system through virtualization. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the experience wasn't great, but it was usable, or at least within what I'd hope for a machine with these settings.

Using Windows 11 in these circumstances is far from ideal, don't get me wrong. But it's also nowhere near as bad as you might think. Sure, Task Manager indicated that RAM usage was at 75% (at best) even when idle, and everything was a little slower to load, but ultimately, the computer was usable, and frankly, about as usable as I would expect a quad-core PC with 2GB of RAM to be.

I wouldn't dare try to run Photoshop or anything intensive on this machine, but I did try downloading the Floorp web browser to use for my typical web work, and it was totally fine. I was able to log into XDA's CMS and even type part of this article without much in the way of problems. Sure, there were some delays when loading some pages, but it worked, and even features like the built-in grammar checker and various media features worked well in Floorp in this VM. I was able to insert links, related articles, and images using this virtual machine just fine. Even playing YouTube videos worked fine.

I've used my fair share of extremely slow computers in my day, and the pains of using this setup were not at all unfamiliar to me. A slow computer will always be slow, and Windows 11 may make things worse, but it didn't make it unusable. There's no reason I can see as to why you shouldn't at least have the option to try Windows 11 in such a setup.

It shouldn't come as a huge surprise, either. After all, Windows 11 SE rus on 2GB of RAM, and it achieves that by disabling a lot of the unnecessary stuff that Windows 11 comes with, like Widgets. So if you don't use some of the superfluous features of Windows 11, you should be fine, too.

AtlasOS is also an option

It makes Windows 11 lighter

While the experience with Windows 11 on 2GB of RAM didn't seem that terrible to me, I did wonder if it could be improved somehow, so I turned to AtlasOS, a modification of Windows 11 that I've played around with a bit before. It removes a lot of fluff and intrusive features from Windows 11 to make it a more pleasant and responsive experience overall, so I figured I'd give it a show and see what it does when the resources are so limited. Admittedly, I didn't follow all the recommended steps perfectly since I should have done another clean install of Windows 11, but my setup was recent enough that I figured it wouldn't hurt.

When using the Atlas Playbook, I left most of the settings as the default, so most security features were still enabled, except Core Isolation and automatic Windows Updates. I also opted not to remove the Snipping Tool.

The results were honestly very solid. Disabling and removing a lot of the unnecessary Windows 11 features makes a pretty big difference in RAM usage, and after setting up AtlasOS, my VM was using around 65% to 70% of its 2GB of memory when idle, so it had a little more wiggle room to work with and things felt a little snappier overall. That percentage difference may not seem huge, but things definitely felt like they were loading a bit faster when navigating our CMS. Menu options and pages loaded quicker, and it felt completely usable.

It's still not an amazing experience, plus this is definitely not something Microsoft would recommend doing, but AtlasOS does receive security updates, so if you were to install Windows 11 on an older or weaker PC that only has 2GB of RAM, you could use this as a way to get more performance without too much of a risk.

Windows 11's system requirements are a little too strict

This experiment just goes to show that many of the requirements Microsoft imposes for Windows 11 aren't truly required, but they just help users get a smoother experience overall. It's interesting because, naturally, 4GB of RAM on Windows 10 would also have offered a much better experience, but it seems as though Microsoft wanted Windows 11 to feel like a more universally-loved experience, so it chose to have higher requirements so that the users who did install it didn't have as much negative feedback. But if you really wanted to keep your computer running a newer version of Windows, this shows it's completely possible.