If your laptop has 8GB of RAM, Microsoft says Windows 11 should now feel quicker on it. In a post on 3 November, the company claims 8GB PCs running 26H2 are up to 20% more responsive and up to 40% faster at juggling several apps, and an outside hands-on test found lower memory use that shrinks under heavy load.
Microsoft’s own figures come with fine print. The 40% number is from an internal lab run on one machine, an HP OmniBook 3 with a Snapdragon X Plus chip, which was made to open 20 Edge tabs, play 4K video and work through big Office files, Outlook and File Explorer, one after another. The company notes that the result applies to that scenario and is not a benchmark.
In a Windows Experience blog post, Microsoft says the biggest change is how Windows handles memory it is short of. It has retuned compression, so Windows can keep up to 2GB more active data in RAM instead of pushing it to the drive, so a tab or app you parked is less likely to start over when you come back to it. Everyday actions such as opening Start, searching, using the right-click menu or launching Snipping Tool are said to respond up to 20% faster than in the January 2026 build, because Windows briefly puts background work such as search indexing behind whatever you just asked for.
The company also trimmed what runs when you are not looking. On PCs with 8GB or less, Widgets loads only when you open it, saving roughly 200MB while it is closed. Idle Edge tabs now go to sleep after 15 minutes rather than two hours, and Teams can launch in Efficiency Mode by default on these PCs. Together with changes in Office, Microsoft says committed-memory growth in its multitasking tests fell by up to 900MB, 360MB of it from Word, PowerPoint, Excel and Outlook. It adds that WhatsApp’s Windows app is seeing double-digit memory gains.
Windows Central put the claims to a test on an Acer Swift Air 14 with a Core 5 320 chip and 8GB of RAM, comparing a year-old 25H2 install with 26H2. Ten minutes after boot, 25H2 was using 5.3GB and 26H2 4.1GB. With 10 browser tabs, Word, Slack and Spotify open, the figures were 7.0GB and 6.6GB, and with a heavier mix including GIMP the machine still paged to the drive, though less than before. The writer’s conclusion was that heavy workloads still strain 8GB, but 26H2 copes better.
To get the changes, the PC must run Windows 11 26H2 at build 26300.9818 or newer. Open Settings, then Windows Update, switch on the option to get updates as soon as they are available, and press Check for updates. Edge, Microsoft 365 and Teams should be current too, since some of the gains arrive through app updates. Microsoft still says work such as 3D modelling and advanced video editing is better with 16GB or more.
More is planned. Next on Microsoft’s list: Search and Widgets will share a single web engine, and so will OneDrive and Photos, while apps built on WinUI 3, among them File Explorer, Notepad and Paint, are being reworked to open faster and take less memory. It is also working with PC makers on how much memory a machine has to reserve for its own hardware.
