Forget 4GB requirement, here is Windows 11 running with 184MB of RAM

Windows 11's official hardware requirement list mandates a minimum of 4GB of RAM to run the operating system. Having only 4GB of system memory is pretty rough these days (unless you use a single tab in your browser, but there are still people out there who are dealing with less, and some of them are even willing to install the latest Windows 11 release on such systems.

Running Windows 11 on a PC with 2GB of memory is not impressive, though. Making the OS run with 22 times less RAM than the official minimum—that is impressive.

NTDEV, the maker of the tiny11 project (a modified lightweight Windows 11 image that is much more resource-friendly), published a YouTube video where he showed Windows 11 version 24H2, the latest Windows 11 release, running on a virtual machine with just 184 MB of random access memory.

Of course, this is not about being able to use a modern operating system on a PC straight from the late 90s. The project only boots in safe mode, and it is very slow. However, the OS can still perform basic things and, to some extent, even multitask. How about running Notepad side-by-side with File Explorer with less than 200 MB of RAM? Pretty impressive.

Windows 11 running with 22 times less of its minimum amount of RAM is not the first whacky project coming from NTDEV. Earlier, he showed Windows 11 version 24H2 LTSC running off a DVD with the help of LZX. He also made it possible to run (barely) Windows 11 on the iPhone 15 Pro and created a modified version that only requires 3GB of disk space.