I think this is slightly misleading. Modern OSes intentionally use available RAM for caching and will reclaim it when needed. The issue isn’t that Windows is “using 6.7 GB”, but whether the system is under memory pressure and paging. I’m not convinced the author fully understands that.

They do mention that the 8 Gig version of the laptop is stuttering while just working on Google Docs in a way that the 16 Gig version does not.

> The Surface Laptop would hang for a few seconds like this several times a day, even when I thought I wasn’t pushing it too hard. I’ve had these temporary freezes while just working in some Google Docs — no Teams call running or anything streaming in the background.

The issue seems to be that there isn't enough RAM for light multitasking or heavier applications without hitting the swap file hard enough that the system stutters.

Related, great article about runtime memory in Linux: https://elinux.org/Runtime_Memory_Measurement

Windows 11 seems to reserve a lot of memory that isn't available to applications. The amount of in-use RAM on a freshly booted system is pretty high, and an 8GB system struggles under light load. I have one that can't run a VM on hyper-V, it just can't reserve even 512MB. The frustrating thing is that 6+ GB is in use but the applications visible in task manager add up to a small fraction of that, maybe 1-2 GB. I think it's being used mainly by the integrated graphics.

This distinction is less a gotcha and more actually immediately obvious in the Windows task manager. It shows cached memory separately and in a different colour. The "in use" part is real in-use excluding the page cache.

On my current Windows 11 install i'm using 7 GB with just this Firefox tab open, and another 18GB of "Cached" RAM.

Same as how `free` on Linux shows it in a different column.

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