Article · AI translation
IT Home reported on November 8 that Microsoft published a blog post saying the Windows development team is continuing to optimize the system’s resource use. A laptop with 8GB of RAM running the latest Windows 11 26H2 now performs nearly as well across a range of everyday and demanding tasks as a laptop with 16GB of RAM did when Windows 11 first launched in 2021.
Pavan Davuluri, head of Microsoft’s Windows business, said Windows has used memory compression for years, but Microsoft has now adjusted its compression strategy for PCs with 8GB of RAM, as well as when data is moved to slower storage. After these changes, Windows can keep up to an additional 2GB of active data in RAM, reducing instances in which previously opened apps have to reload when users switch back to them because their data was moved out of memory.
Microsoft has also reduced the resources used by some Windows system components and apps on PCs with 8GB of RAM. Windows Widgets now load only when users open them, saving about 200MB of RAM. Edge has shortened the wait before inactive tabs go to sleep from 2 hours to 15 minutes, and Microsoft says the browser starts up to 33% faster. Teams enables efficiency mode by default and starts up to 20% faster. While Windows, Edge and Microsoft 365 are running concurrently, the increase in committed system memory is reduced by up to 900MB.
Citing these improvements, Microsoft claims that laptops with 8GB of RAM now perform nearly as well as 2021 models with 16GB of RAM in CPU performance, web browsing, AI tasks such as background blur and facial recognition, and tasks such as exporting 4K video. However, the underlying data compares 8GB laptops from 2 different hardware generations. The performance gains come mainly from newer processors and faster memory and storage. Although Microsoft has made some system optimizations, this does not mean Windows 11 itself has become 94% faster.
Microsoft also stressed in its testing notes that the results apply only to the “devices tested” and do not represent the performance of all PCs with 8GB of RAM. Users still need 16GB or even 32GB of RAM for demanding workloads or extensive multitasking.