Microsoft admits 8GB RAM is fine for Windows 11, after years of pushing 16GB as the baseline
(www.windowslatest.com)
About halfway through the lifecycle for Windows 10, HDD performance became pure garbage and I genuinely do not know how/why they did that. Something about how they were handling indexing or read operations at idle meant pinning the disk at 100% usage almost all the time and the only solve was an SSD. I hate that shit so much.