The company also revealed a revamped Photos app that testers can try out right now.
Microsoft has been working on some Windows 11 updates that it is starting to offer to all users after testing them with Windows Insiders. Among other things, the company said it has made the operating system up to 20% more responsive, in part by improving efficiency and memory management. For example, Windows 11 “can now keep up to 2 GB more of your active data in memory instead of moving it to slower storage, helping your PC stay responsive when you open more apps or browser tabs,” Navjot Virk, Microsoft’s vice president of Windows experiences, wrote in a blog post.
Virk noted that PCs with 8GB of memory might see “a particularly significant difference.” This is welcome, given that it is increasingly expensive to upgrade a PC’s RAM. AI data centers can largely be blamed for gobbling up as much memory as possible and driving up prices for normal people. Microsoft, of course, is heavily involved in this, so improved memory management and efficiency seems like the least the company can do to alleviate the RAM crisis.
One thing Windows 11 will do on PCs with 8GB or less of RAM is load widgets only when users actually open them. Microsoft claims this will free up over 200MB of memory for other tasks.
Microsoft says it should also be faster to pair AirPods with PCs as part of improving the reliability of Bluetooth headphones. Windows Hello logins would also be easier, faster and more reliable.
Windows Insider testers can now try out the revamped, AI-powered search that the company unveiled last week. They can perform thousands of actions directly through search, which Microsoft is turning into a chatbot.
Other Insider updates include a new Photos app with a revamped gallery that can bring together snaps from local storage, OneDrive, and iCloud. The built-in editor is said to load 25% faster. The native viewer also loads 30% faster, Microsoft claims.
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