Officially Windows 11 requires at least 4GB of RAM to run on a laptop, tablet, or desktop PC. However, "NTDEV", the developer behind the popular Tiny10 and Tiny11 Windows OS mod projects, has posted proof that he got a version of Tiny11 to run on a PC with below 4GB of RAM.
Behold, another possible world record!
— NTDEV (@NTDEV_) July 11, 2023
Windows 11 on just 176MB of RAM, about 23 times smaller than the official system requirements (4GB of RAM)!
The base system is a heavily trimmed down image of tiny11.
Pointless and unnecessary? Absolutely!
Impressive? You tell me. pic.twitter.com/UeC6MY6wwz
In a Twitter post made on Tuesday night, NTDEV showed a screenshot of the Windows 11 Performance tab in Task Manager, showing that it was running on just 176MB of RAM. He stated that this was due to running a "heavily trimmed down image of tiny11." He added, "Pointless and unnecessary? Absolutely! Impressive? You tell me."
He also posted a video on YouTube showing the PC running on that minuscule amount of RAM. The post also offered a bit more info on how he was able to accomplish this task:
This possible world record has been made possible through extensive trial and error, by seeing which drivers and services are absolutely the ones for required to Windows 11 to boot. The base system is a heavily (even more so) trimmed down image of tiny11. Even things like which disk drive interface was used were taken into consideration (I used IDE instead of the more recent SATA or NVMe so that it wouldn"t need as many drivers to boot).
If you want to try out Tiny11 for yourself, it"s available for download from the Internet Archive. Keep in mind that you will still need a valid Windows 11 key from Microsoft to run this version. Also, installing a modified Windows 11 ISO could create lots of issues in your PC, so you should download this version at your own risk.