It has been a long time since the standard version of Windows ran on less than 1GB of RAM. Nevertheless, a 16-year-old Twitter user posted a screenshot of Windows 10 running on just 192MB of RAM, partially running on just 140MB.

As discovered by our friends at Tom's Hardware, Twitter user @0xN0ri documented the progress in a Twitter thread, showing Windows 10 (version 1909) 32 with 512MB of RAM, half the official amount needed to It begins with his success in getting a 32-bit build up and running, which is half the official amount of RAM required.

The user told Tom's Hardware that he was running Windows 10 in a virtual machine environment (Oracle VM Virtualbox) on a Dell Inspiron 3670 desktop tower running Arch Linux.

This allowed us to continue to reduce the amount of RAM, first to 256 MB, then to 192 MB. Further attempts to run Windows 10 with 128MB of RAM resulted in a blue screen error; when I tried with 140MB, it technically booted, but 128MB was not enough to load the UI for login.

There is no grand goal in these, but the accomplishment itself is interesting, as is the pursuit of an overclocking record. It shouldn't work, but it does; since Windows XP in 2001, the official requirement to run Windows has never been less than 1GB - Windows XP required 64MB and recommended the use of 128MB. [CORRECTION: Windows Vista ran with the minimum required 512MB of RAM, although Microsoft recommended 1GB.]

Also, like record overclocking, there is not much utility in this action, but it should still provide some stimulus for low-spec gamers.

"It takes about three minutes to boot to the desktop and is useless with virtual machine files stored on a 7200 RPM hard drive," the user explains." With 192 MB of RAM, only Task Manager, CMD, and File Explorer could be opened, and with 15 MB of free space, performance was very poor."

You can read more about Nori and their various projects on their GitHub page.