Windows 11 requires TPM 2.0 on all machines, including virtual ones. This is part of Microsoft's insistence on making Windows more secure against hackers exploiting vulnerabilities, but it also comes at a performance cost on systems where virtualization 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 affect your computer's overall performance.
See also: Microsoft: Windows 11 issues with VirtualBox & Intel Killer
Microsoft today opened the doors for Windows users to upgrade to Windows 11, which is a strange mix of various UI improvements, new and familiar features, features missing from pre-release, and security improvements, all with less legacy clutter. The upgrade process is smoother than ever, but once you start using Windows 11, you'll have to unlearn some old habits and adjust to the fact that it's still not perfect, despite Microsoft's best efforts to make the interface more modern and appealing.
To put it simply, the new operating system is still in development, but early adopters have a few things to worry about. The first is that when building Windows 11, Microsoft wanted to implement a level of enterprise-grade security on all machines that can run it. This has caused a lot of controversy over the system requirements, which are stricter than those of Windows 10 and leave out many existing computers with relatively modern hardware.
However, if you upgrade to Windows 11 by purchasing a new PC, you may see reduced gaming performance due to Microsoft's implementation of virtualization-based security (VBS). The issue was first discovered by the folks at PC Gamer, who did some testing and found that OEM machines performed below expectations.
See also: Windows 11: The Store is open to third-party app stores
It turns out that VBS is enabled by default on these systems and 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.
VBS was first introduced in Windows 10 as an optional feature and uses hardware virtualization to create and isolate a secure memory area from the regular operating system. Windows can then use this virtual secure mode to host various security features and prevent malware from exploiting vulnerabilities in the operating system and injecting malicious code. For enterprise customers, this provides an additional layer of security.
With Windows 11, Microsoft wants to make VBS standard for both consumers and business/government machines. To be clear, VBS will only be enabled by default on new installations. If you perform an in-place upgrade using an ISO, through the Windows 11 Installation Assistant, or after being offered the upgrade through Windows Update, VBS will be disabled unless it was manually enabled before starting the upgrade process.
The second biggest source of annoyance for early adopters making the switch to Windows 11 will be a series of bugs that will likely be fixed in the coming weeks or months. Some are serious enough to degrade your experience, like a memory leak related to the File Explorer process that can quickly eat up available RAM.
See also: Windows 11: How to change your desktop background?
This was discovered by Reddit user u/gyrohan269 two months ago, but it doesn't seem to have been fixed in the public build (22000.194). Normally, File Explorer – or any other process for that matter – should free up allocated space when it's no longer needed.
However, in Windows 11, File Explorer seems to hoard almost all of its available RAM every time you open a new window. This means that if you're working with multiple File Explorer windows open, closing them leaves behind "garbage" in system memory, slowing down your system when you use RAM-intensive applications, whether they're browsers or productivity software.
The only way to fix this problem is to open Task Manager and manually restart the File Explorer process.
Information source: techspot.com
