Windows 11 is getting faster boot times and 8GB RAM performance

Microsoft confirmed at IFA 2026 that upcoming updates for Windows 11 will include faster boot times. According to Mark Linton, head of Windows & Devices at Microsoft, the company has already made significant progress in both the startup times and responsiveness of Windows Hello, and further improvements are expected.

At the same time, Microsoft reaffirmed its earlier promise to optimize Windows 11 for PCs with only 8GB of RAM. According to Linton, Microsoft is still committed to this goal of making weaker Windows PCs run well, but he didn’t provide any specific plans or features.

This renewed commitment is important because Microsoft recently halved the RAM in its own Surface laptops. The newest entry-level Surface models only have 8GB of RAM and 256GB of storage, which isn’t even enough to meet the minimum requirements of Copilot+.

Even for Windows 11, a minimum of 32GB of RAM was recommended for a long time… until Microsoft quietly removed this recommendation from its support pages. It’s disappointing but not surprising, as the ongoing RAM crisis has spiked prices of memory and storage, forcing companies to rethink their strategies and shift to other solutions.

It’s not yet clear when the upcoming improvements to boot times and memory usage will be rolled out to regular Windows 11 users. All we know is they’re expected to come as part of future updates.

Further reading: Speed up Windows 11 on PCs with less RAM