Microsoft says Windows 11 multitasking is up to 40% faster on PCs with 8GB of RAM

What Microsoft announced

Microsoft has started rolling out a Windows 11 update centred on memory efficiency, and it is making striking claims about what that means for lower-end hardware. According to The Verge, Windows chief Pavan Davuluri says that on PCs with 8GB of RAM, the operating system is now "up to 20 percent more responsive" and multitasking is "up to 40 percent faster" — although he attributed those numbers to Microsoft's own lab testing rather than independent benchmarks.

The release builds on work Microsoft has been doing over the past year to reduce how much memory Windows consumes, following earlier claims that the OS had become more responsive on 8GB machines.

Compression is the core change

The main technical lever is memory compression. Instead of moving data that no longer fits in RAM out to a paging file on disk — a far slower process that drags down applications — Windows now compresses that data so it can stay in memory. Davuluri says this allows the system to keep as much as 2GB of additional active data in RAM. The practical upshot is that an app or browser tab you left open is far less likely to reload from scratch when you come back to it.

Savings across Windows, Edge and Microsoft 365

Beyond compression, Microsoft trimmed memory use across the operating system and its first-party apps. The Verge reports that the combined changes cut committed-memory growth by as much as 900MB. The specifics include:

• Optimisations in Word, PowerPoint, Excel and Outlook that together free up around 360MB of RAM.
• On 8GB machines, Windows 11 no longer loads widgets at startup; they are only loaded when you actually open the widgets panel, saving roughly 200MB.
• Inactive tabs in Edge now go to sleep after 15 minutes of inactivity, further reducing memory pressure.

More improvements are coming

Microsoft says this update is not the end of the effort. Memory compression is expected to become smarter and more efficient over the coming months. Windows features and apps are also set to share more common components — for example, widgets and search will use a single shared web engine rather than each shipping their own.

The company is additionally working with PC manufacturers and chipmakers to optimise how much memory a machine reserves for its hardware, which would leave more RAM available to Windows and the applications running on it.

Why it matters

Eight gigabytes is the configuration Microsoft is explicitly targeting here, and it is a common baseline spec that has increasingly felt squeezed as browsers, chat apps and operating systems have grown hungrier. If the claimed gains hold up outside the lab, the update could meaningfully extend the usable life of millions of budget and older machines, delaying hardware upgrades that users might otherwise feel forced into.

The usual caveats apply: these are "up to" figures from Microsoft's own testing, so real-world improvements will vary by workload and hardware. But the direction is notable. Rather than pushing users toward more RAM, Microsoft is investing in making the software itself leaner — and with further compression work, shared components and reduced hardware memory reservations still on the roadmap, memory efficiency appears to be an ongoing engineering priority for Windows rather than a one-off tuning pass.