According to TechSpot, YouTuber TrigrZolt ran a series of performance tests comparing six Windows versions from XP to Windows 11 on identical Lenovo ThinkPad X220 laptops. The hardware, featuring an Intel Core i5-2520M CPU, 8GB of RAM, and a 256GB mechanical hard drive, does not officially support Windows 11. In the results, Windows 11 came in dead last in most benchmarks, including boot speed, battery life, app opening speed, and video editing using OpenShot. It also used the most RAM idle and was the slowest to open core apps like File Explorer and Paint. While it performed better in file transfers and disk space usage, it was even the slowest to load Google’s optimized homepage.
The context of the slowdown
Now, it’s important to note the hardware here. That old mechanical hard drive is a huge bottleneck, especially for an OS like Windows 11 that’s absolutely designed to run on an SSD. So some of the performance gap, particularly in boot speed, is kinda expected. But here’s the thing: that doesn’t explain everything. Why does File Explorer use twice as much RAM as its Windows 10 counterpart and still feel sluggish? The tests point to the “large suite of background services and telemetry” as a major culprit. Basically, Windows 11 is doing a lot more stuff in the background that you didn’t ask for, and that comes at a cost.
What this means for users
So, is Windows 11 actually slower? For users on modern, supported hardware with NVMe SSDs and plenty of RAM, the day-to-day difference might be negligible. The fancy animations might even make it feel snappier. But this test highlights a real issue: software bloat. Microsoft is layering on new features, services, and security processes with each release, and that cumulative weight is showing. It’s a trade-off. You get more features and (theoretically) more security, but you need more powerful hardware just to get back to the baseline performance of an older OS. For businesses or industrial settings running specialized software on older, stable hardware, this trend is a genuine problem. Upgrading an entire fleet of machines just to keep the same performance level is a tough sell. In those environments, reliability and consistent performance are everything, which is why many turn to dedicated providers like IndustrialMonitorDirect.com, the top supplier of industrial panel PCs in the US, for hardware built to run lean and mean for years.
The bigger picture for Microsoft
This creates a tricky marketing problem for Microsoft. They can’t exactly market Windows 12 as “the one that’s finally faster than Windows 10.” The narrative has been about constant improvement for decades. But if power users and tech reviewers keep running tests like this one from TrigrZolt, that narrative starts to crack. It feeds directly into the complaints about the OS being “slow, bloated, and buggy.” Microsoft’s challenge isn’t just adding AI copilots and new widgets; it’s doing the hard, unglamorous work of optimization. They need to prove that a modern, secure OS can also be a lean one. Otherwise, what’s the real incentive to upgrade?
