Microsoft says months of fixes have made Windows 11 "up to 20 percent more responsive," with the biggest gains showing up on PCs that only have 8GB of RAM, The Verge reports.
The work comes out of a plan Microsoft laid out earlier this year to clean up Windows 11's performance and reliability. Start, File Explorer, Search, and Edge have all been tuned, but Navjot Virk, Microsoft's corporate vice president of Windows experiences, says much of the gain comes from "making smarter use of memory and system resources."
According to Virk, Windows can now keep up to 2GB more of your active data in memory instead of pushing it out to slower storage. On machines with 8GB or less, Widgets now load only when opened, which frees up more than 200MB for apps.
There's a list of smaller fixes too. Windows Update is supposed to be less disruptive, Windows Hello sign-in is faster, Bluetooth pairing is more reliable (Microsoft says AirPods pair up to 15 seconds faster), and the taskbar can finally move to the top or sides of the screen.
Next up is a rebuilt Windows Search that's faster and more capable. It's in testing with Windows Insiders now, and Microsoft says it will roll out more broadly later this year.
— via The Verge