Microsoft's Windows 11 Apps Still Sucking Down Resources
Windows 11 has undergone significant changes this year, and its latest update is expected to bring meaningful improvements to speed and responsiveness. However, despite these refinements, Microsoft's first-party apps continue to be a point of contention for users. The built-in apps, such as the Weather app and Outlook, have been criticized for their resource-intensive nature.
According to Shaheer Khan, author of the article, Windows 11's GUI is not the primary cause of its high resource consumption. Instead, it's the pre-installed apps that are built on technologies like WebView2 that are responsible for the OS's resource intensity.
The Weather app, for instance, consumes over 1GB RAM, while Outlook uses between 600-750MB RAM. These apps can use nearly all a user's available RAM before even opening a browser, not to mention the telemetry and ads they include.
Microsoft has claimed that 8GB RAM is sufficient for Windows 11, but Shaheer Khan disputes this assertion, citing his own experience with an 8GB configuration. He found that using first-party apps would be nearly impossible due to system swapping to disk before any work could be done.