Windows 11 is now ‘up to 40 percent faster’ on PCs with 8GB of RAM

Tom Warren

is a senior correspondent and author of Notepad, who has been covering all things Microsoft, PC, and tech for over 20 years.

Microsoft has been doing a lot of work to improve memory usage and increase performance on Windows 11 PCs over the past year. Last month the company revealed Windows 11 is now “more responsive” and runs better on PCs with 8GB of RAM, and now the company is releasing a new update today that includes further memory improvements.

“On 8 GB PCs, Windows is now up to 20 percent more responsive, and multitasking is up to 40 percent faster in our lab test,” says Windows chief Pavan Davuluri. One of the key ways Microsoft has achieved better performance on PCs with 8GB of RAM is through compression.

“As a result, Windows can now keep up to 2 GB more of your active data in memory instead of moving it to slower storage, so an app or tab you left open is less likely to reload when you return,” says Davuluri. This compression helps Windows avoid writing data to a virtual memory paging file on a disk, slowing down apps and performance.

Microsoft is also making improvements across Windows, Edge, and Microsoft 365 apps that reduce “committed-memory growth by up to 900 MB.” Memory improvements in Word, PowerPoint, Excel, and Outlook alone add up to 360MB of RAM savings. Windows 11 no longer loads widgets on a PC with 8GB of RAM until you open the widgets panel, saving around 200MB of RAM. Inactive tabs in Edge now sleep after 15 minutes, reducing memory consumption further.

While Microsoft is shipping an update to Windows 11 with these memory improvements, the company is still working on improving RAM usage in Windows in the coming months. Memory compression will get “smarter and more efficient” over the next few months, and Windows features and apps will share more common parts like widgets and search sharing a single web engine. Microsoft is also working with PC makers and chipmakers to optimize how much memory a PC needs to reserve for its hardware, enabling more for Windows.

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• Tom Warren