Windows 8 will do things better, faster and look nicer than Windows 7. The good news is that if you’ve bought a PC in the last couple of years you will probably be able install and take advantage of Windows 8 — note you can download your preview copy to give Windows 8 a try now. Microsoft has already said that Windows 8 will be able to run on previous generation machines, even an ATOM-powered netbook with just 1GB of RAM.

Well today Microsoft is showing us how it was able to reduce the system footprint, in order to be able to get Windows 8 to run smoothly on such a low-end netbook, while leaving memory available for other applications to run. In the image above you can see task manager memory usage on the same system, in Windows 7 SP1 on the left and Windows 8 on the right. To achieve this reduction, Microsoft has made hundreds of specific changes to minimize OS memory use in Windows 8. Hit up the link after the break for the full lowdown by Microsoft’s Bill Karagounis on the Building Windows 8 blog.
continue reading