Pseudonymous developer NTDev has managed to demonstrate Windows 11 booting and running on a system with only 176 MB of RAM. This RAM quota is approximately a 20th of the Microsoft recommended minimum amount. To achieve this daring world record, Windows 11 and its drivers were pared back to a bare minimum according to the brains behind the Tiny11 project.
In NTDev's video we see that when using small apps and utilities the highly-constrained system is "surprisingly usable," if not responsive. However, there is an elephant in the room, as this pared-back Tiny11 system boots to a command prompt, rather than Explorer. This marks a stark contrast between this and the prior Windows 11 in 200 MB RAM achievement. Sacrificing Explorer might be worth it though, as testing Tiny11 running in 200 MB with the default Windows desktop file manager app running in the background was admitted to be "terribly slow."
