Question Is Windows 8.1 the lightest OS?

[rscheetah30]

Out of Win10, Win8.1 and Win7 is Windows 8.1 the lightest?
I've just installed Windows 8.1 and I'm finding it to be a lot lighter than both Windows 10 and Windows 7. It consumes less ram and less cpu time.

Is this your experience as well?

 

[13thmonkey]

I'd have thought 10, I think the ram issue is tricky as it gives up ram more easily perhaps, and pre-loads more and better than 7 or 8. CPU time however you might be right, it's been more than a while since I looked at 8

 

[Seceo3]

Windows to go. Runs off an 8Gb flash drive with room to spare

 

[Math Geek]

if you strip down any of them, they will be very light on resources.

i have an old netbook that came with win 7 starter and it ran pretty slow. win 10 runs on it better once i removed all the bloat and stripped all the junk out of it. still slow for sure but it feels a bit faster now. but strip any of them down and they'll all run nice and snappy.

 

[1111eugene]

I tried different windows OS's like million times
the harddrive or ssd it doesn't matter
a disk in short
works faster on win 8.1
win10 seems to bother it "all the time"
the fps in games is the same
but win 8.1 doesnt have directx12
they say directx12 can improve perfomance and increase fps...well I tried it a lot and 100% it made perfomance worse big time...
it's just another myth for kids...
using reshade will be the same, if you can't live without some visual effects like advanced mothion blur..
just like their new gpu technologies that should cost nothing ..
whatever...

also you need a clean OS image files from microsoft... don't install any repack etc...
and don't turn off services... it can free some ram yes, but the general OS speed will decrease
well, recovery and windows defender are better to be turned off. the firewall also, I think.
also there's a soft called windows aero tweaker..a good one for lilbit of tweaking..
also google how to enable the built in administrator acoount... ok
press win+r, type lusrmgr.msc and press enter, go to users folder somewhere on left, find administrator account somewhere a bit to right, press rmb, go to properties and UNCHECK "account is disabled" press ok or apply, then press rmb on every other account, including the one you created, go to properties and CHECK the "account is disabled". So you should have only administrator account unchecked from being disabled. now restart. it will start like the first time with hello etc, it's fine. So now you automaticly have all the rights to write files to any folder, to forget about "run with admin rights" for ever and many other good things... then run windows aero tweaker and at least disable UAC for built in administrator account.. And now you have full rights to do anything without some stupid errors, no popup windows, no "smart screen", no bothering "are you sure?" etc

and yes, I think win 8.1 is the best option within microsoft OSs

also if you want your profiles be in the admin account, just copy it including hidden folders without overwrite (but I guess it doesnt matter in this case) in the users folder.
after that you can delete your old profile to free up some space, because some account may have very large files sometimes.. there's a lot of ways, for example go to control panel - system - advanced system settings - user profiles, press settings - select the old account and press delete