Windows 11 performs worse than older Windows versions in nearly every benchmark
Why are we not surprised?
By Kishalaya Kundu January 6, 2026 at 9:21 AM 44 commentsFacepalm: Microsoft markets Windows 11 as the fastest and most secure version of the operating system, but users often complain about it being slow, bloated, and buggy. A new speed test now suggests that there may be more truth to those complaints than Microsoft would like to admit.
YouTuber TrigrZolt ran several tests pitting six generations of Windows - from XP to Windows 11 - against one another to see which one can complete a range of tasks the fastest. Surprisingly, Windows 11 came dead last in most of the tests, including boot speed, battery life, app opening speed, and video editing.
Windows 11 also came in last place in terms of memory use, taking up much more RAM than older versions of the OS, even without any apps running on the laptop. The additional memory usage can mostly be attributed to the large suite of background services and telemetry that power users have complained about for years. Windows 11 was also the slowest in the video editing test using OpenShot.
The newest version of Windows also took the longest time to open File Explorer and Paint. While the new Paint app has many additional features that could explain its poor performance on older hardware, File Explorer's sluggishness has been a constant source of frustration for Windows 11 users; it remains painfully slow despite using twice as much RAM as its Windows 10 counterpart.
On the bright side, Windows 11 managed relatively better results in some benchmarks, such as file transfer speed and disk space usage comparison for default apps. The latest OS also came third in one of the page-loading tests but, surprisingly, it was the slowest to load Google's home page, which is optimized to load blazingly fast on just about any device.
In case you're wondering, all six laptops used in the tests were the exact same model: Lenovo ThinkPad X220 equipped with an Intel Core i5-2520M CPU, 8GB of RAM, and a 256GB mechanical hard disk. The device does not officially support Windows 11, which likely contributed to its poor showing.
For example, Windows 11 is optimized to boot on SSDs and not legacy mechanical drives, so using the HDD as the boot drive likely resulted in slower boot speed. Similarly, the latest version of Paint includes relatively advanced editing features that require additional memory and fast storage for optimum performance, but the ThinkPad used in the tests offered neither.
Still, the tests indicate that Microsoft is struggling to make Windows 11 the lean and fast operating system that many users want it to be. As such, the gimmicky new features, unnecessary background processes, and resource-heavy services are major impediments to the OS achieving its full performance potential.
