Windows 11 gets up to 20% snappier, and Microsoft aims its memory fix at 8GB PCs

Windows 11 can now hold up to 2GB more of whatever you are working on in memory instead of pushing it out to the much slower storage drive, Microsoft says, and on PCs with 8GB of RAM or less it no longer loads Widgets until you open the panel, which hands more than 200MB back to your apps. The company puts the overall result at up to 20% better responsiveness in Start, Search, File Explorer, Settings, Snipping Tool and right-click menus. For anyone on a budget laptop that stutters once a dozen browser tabs are open, this goes straight at the problem.

When RAM fills up, Windows moves less-used data to the SSD, a step called paging, and pulls it back when you return to that tab or document. Even a fast SSD is far slower than RAM, so paging shows up as the short freeze when you switch windows. On an 8GB machine, 2GB is a quarter of all installed memory. Navjot Virk, Microsoft’s corporate vice president of Windows experiences, wrote that the work “can make an…