Windows 11 is now available, memory leaks and performance sacrifices included



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In context: Windows 11 requires TPM 2.0 on all machines, including virtual machines. This is due to Microsoft’s insistence on making Windows more secure against hackers who scavenge it for vulnerabilities, but it also comes at the cost of performance on systems where virtualization-based security is enabled. . At the same time, early adopters will find that Microsoft’s new operating system comes with the usual collection of bugs, some of which can also impact your PC’s overall performance.

Microsoft today opened the door for Windows users to move to Windows 11, which is an odd mix of various UI improvements, new and familiar features, missing features promised before release, and improvements to security, all with less legacy clutter. The upgrade process is smoother than ever, but once you’re up and running with Windows 11, you’ll have to unlearn some old habits and adjust to the fact that it’s still far from perfect, despite the best efforts of Microsoft to make the interface more modern and inviting.

To put it simply, the new operating system is still in development, but early adopters have little to worry about. The first is that in creating Windows 11, Microsoft wanted to apply an enterprise-level layer of security to all machines capable of running it. This has sparked a lot of controversy around the system requirements, which are stricter than Windows 10 and leave out many existing PCs with relatively modern hardware.

If, however, you migrate to Windows 11 by purchasing a new PC, you might experience reduced gaming performance due to Microsoft’s implementation of Virtualization-Based Security (VBS). The problem was first discovered by the folks at PC Gamer, who performed tests and found that OEM machines were performing below expectations.

It turns out that VBS is enabled by default on these systems, and this leads to performance regressions of up to five percent in Far Cry New Dawn, 10 percent in the 3DMark Time Spy benchmark, 25 percent in Horizon Zero Dawn and 28 percent in Shadow of the Tomb Raider. These results have been confirmed by ComputerBase and UL Benchmarks, and the latter is working on an update to its benchmark utilities that will take VBS into account and help users compare scores fairly.

For context, VBS was first introduced in Windows 10 as an optional feature and uses hardware virtualization to create and isolate a secure memory region from the normal operating system. Windows can then use this virtual secure mode to host several security features and prevent malware from exploiting operating system vulnerabilities and injecting malicious code. For corporate customers, this provides an additional layer of security.

With Windows 11, Microsoft wants to make VBS standard on consumer and corporate / government machines. To be clear, VBS will only be enabled by default on new installations. If you are performing an in-place upgrade using an ISO, through the Windows 11 installation wizard, or after receiving the upgrade through Windows Update, VBS will be disabled unless it is not upgraded. ‘has been manually activated before starting the upgrade process.

The second biggest source of annoyance for first-time users switching to Windows 11 will be a series of bugs that will likely be fixed in the weeks or months to come. Some are serious enough to degrade your experience, such as a memory leak related to the file explorer process which can quickly consume your available RAM.

This was discovered by Reddit user u / gyrohan269 two months ago, but it does not appear to be fixed in the public version (22000.194). Normally, File Explorer – or some other process for that matter – should free up the allocated memory space once it is no longer needed or the process itself is finished.

However, in Windows 11, File Explorer seems to hang onto almost all of the allocated RAM every time you open a new window. This means that if you are working with many File Explorer windows open, closing them leaves garbage in the system memory which can slow down your system when using RAM-hungry applications, be it browsers or productivity software. We were able to reproduce the issue ourselves, which may have an impact, especially on machines with less than eight gigabytes of RAM.

At the time of writing, the only way to fix this is to open Task Manager and manually restart the File Explorer process.

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