Believe it or not, but a Twitter user who goes by the user name @0xN0ri managed to run the Windows 10 operating system (32-bit version) on his computer with as little as 192MB RAM.
As per official hardware requirements outlined by Microsoft, a 32-bit version of Windows 10 requires a minimum of 1GB of RAM whereas a 64-GB one requires 2GB of RAM, all this to achieve optimal performance.
Windows 10 runs with only 192MB RAM
So, how could someone run the Windows 10 32-bit operating system, which runs on more than one billion devices across the globe, with only 192MB of RAM, which is unbelievably insane?
Well, there’s a Twitter thread that reveals the whole story.
At first, Nori decided to run Windows 10 32-bit with only 512MB RAM, which is half of what Microsoft officially recommends. Out of 512MB RAM, 480MB was apparently in use. Subsequently, Nori decided to go even lower with 256GB RAM and there was absolutely no issue running the OS whatsoever.
However, with 128MB of RAM, the system threw a Blue Screen error saying “Your PC ran into a problem and needs to restart. We’re just collecting some error info, and then we’ll restart for you.” But then, Nori could successfully boot his Windows 10 32-bit with only 192MB of RAM.
Nori further told TomsHardware that the CPU for the project was an Intel Core i5-8400 with one core reserved the Oracle VM VirtualBox whereas the version of Windows Windows 10 Pro x86.
“It took around three minutes to boot up to the desktop and it’s unusable with the virtual machine file stored on my 7200RPM hard drive.”
“I was only able to get task manager, cmd, and file explorer open on 192MB RAM and the performance was very bad with 15MB free.”
The experiment was conducted on Dell Inspiron 3670 running Arch Linux.
Why did 128MB RAM throw a blue screen error?
The reason why Windows 10 did not successfully boot with 128MB RAM and thew a blue screen error because of the memory resources that were clearly insufficient. Meanwhile, with 140MB RAM, the Windows 10 OS was able to boot. However, the UI that allows users to log in to Windows 10 machine did not run.
Goes without saying, this was just an experiment and you require at least 1GB of RAM to successfully boot Windows 10 32-bit and load all the UI elements.
Reminded us of the time when one of our forum users was able to run Windows 7 on a P2 with 266MHz CPU, 96MB RAM & 4Mb graphic card!
