The ‘bloated’ nature of Windows 11 is a conversation that’s been talked to death. There’s so much going on in both the foreground and the background; it gobbles up more system resources than ever before.
It’s why I’d never recommend anyone buying a new PC or laptop in 2026 get anything less than 16GB of RAM (despite the fact that RAM now costs the same as a Ferrari). There’s nothing we can do about Windows 11, right?
Debloating and optimizing that anyone can understand
I’ve tried some other debloat tools in the past that have worked, but also weren’t as clear as Winhance is about what the things you’re disabling actually do. I’ve ended up making things a lot worse, rather than better, blindly removing software and turning things off.
Winhance, with its most recent update, looks like a really clean app, but it’s also straightforward to understand.
Under each item that you can enable or disable is a clear, simple description of what that particular thing does and, in a lot of cases, the circumstances in which you’ll be safe to disable it. Some are obvious, like turning off the fax service because who’s using a fax machine in 2026?
The big one is telemetry. There is a frankly absurd pile of services on your Windows 11 PC that will report back to Microsoft. For privacy, you may want these turned off, but each of them will have to operate in the background. And that means using resources.
Winhance touches all aspects of your PC, from software and services to optimizations for the CPU and gaming. In the case of the latter, it’s too soon to tell (and humble brag since I’m using an RTX 5090; maybe I wouldn’t really notice), but overall, there has been a noticeable improvement.
Reclaiming my RAM (since I can’t afford to add any more)
I was hoping that the gaming and network-specific tweaks that you can apply might help eliminate some niggles in about the only game I play right now, Call of Duty: Black Ops 7.
Again, it’s too soon to tell, and the dreaded packet burst is likely something I can’t do much about. But overall system resource usage is down while gaming, it’s as stable as it’s ever going to get, and all is well.
It’s the RAM that’s benefited the most. Prior to playing around with Winhance, I was seeing around 40% usage after boot, though admittedly part of that was being lazy and not disabling a bunch of apps at startup.
With those disabled and some of the Winhance tweaks applied, I’m now down to 15% at first boot and around 25-30% with the apps open I need for the workday. That’s a significant improvement. When playing Call of Duty, my total RAM usage is now topping out at about 45%.
I couldn’t tell you exactly which of the tweaks worked the best, but my advice would be to go in and look at everything carefully. I’ve done away with about all the telemetry I can see and removed some software I will never ever use, and so far, so good.
As always, be careful!
That Winhance is so user-friendly is what makes it special in my eyes. It’s not a tool built for nerds; it’s built so anyone can understand it.
The usual words of caution, though. When you go poking around in your system, you can make things better, but you can also do the opposite. I speak from experience.
Winhance will create a system restore point should anything go wrong, but my advice is to make sure you read everything carefully, not just blindly go in there turning things off. But I think you might be pleased with the outcome. Find out more and try it for yourself by grabbing it from its official website.
Join us on Reddit at r/WindowsCentral to share your insights and discuss our latest news, reviews, and more.
First Appeared on
Source link
Leave feedback about this