Windows 11’s performance flops in real-world showdown—here’s why

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Windows 11 is supposed to be Microsoft’s fast and secure future of PC computing, but in a recent real‑world test it came in dead last against five older versions of Windows on almost every performance metric.

In a YouTube benchmark showdown, creator TrigrZolt installed everything from Windows XP through Windows 11 on identical Lenovo ThinkPad X220 laptops and then timed everyday tasks like booting, opening apps, web browsing, and basic content creation.

The bad news for anyone already annoyed with Windows 11’s vibes: it was consistently the slowest OS in the lineup.

Across the board, Windows 11 took longer to boot, drained more battery, opened apps more slowly, and even lagged behind in a simple OpenShot video editing test.

It also hogged the most RAM at idle, thanks to a pile of background services and telemetry that power users have been complaining about since launch.

Even core tools like File Explorer and Paint felt sluggish, with Explorer in particular still using roughly twice the memory of its Windows 10 counterpart while remaining annoyingly slow.

There are a couple of asterisks. All of the testing happened on an older ThinkPad with a mechanical hard drive that doesn’t officially support Windows 11, while Microsoft’s latest OS is clearly tuned for SSDs and more modern hardware.

Windows 11 also did better in a few spots, like file transfer speed and default app disk usage, and it wasn’t always dead last in page‑loading tests.

Still, the takeaway tracks with what a lot of Windows 11 users already feel: Microsoft keeps bolting on flashy features and background processes while the OS itself gets heavier and less responsive, especially on older machines.

Until Microsoft has its own “XP Service Pack 2” style clean‑up moment for Windows 11, anyone on aging hardware is probably better off sticking with something leaner like Windows 10.

Kevin Raposo

Kevin is KnowTechie's founder and executive editor. With over 15 years of blogging experience in the tech industry, Kevin has transformed what was once a passion project into a full-blown tech news publication. Shoot him an email at kevin@knowtechie.com.