The trusty old Taskbar has been running along the bottom of the desktop for eons without much of a change. Basically, a prime example in the computing world of if it works, don’t fix it.
However, this defining element of Windows is set to get a big change soon. And it comes from the stylish new “News and Interests” section that pops up news headlines, weather forecasts, and more when you click on it.
The idea being to enable quicker access to information for users.
But while this is a neat enough idea, it is something that comes with a heavy cost — a heavy cost in terms of resources required.
As noted, this new feature could end up slowing down your PC. The new feature checks news feeds in the background to give you the latest information. The process works away in the background, but when looking for news it can take up to 150MB of RAM.
That’s a decent chunk of memory, especially on older computers and slower devices with limited amounts of RAM. In other words, if your PC is struggling for memory, it could result in a degradation of performance.
This is not something that will be welcomed by people who want their Windows installs to be as clean as possible, light and breezy. The idea of sacrificing memory to a feature they rarely use will not be too popular.
Good thing is that Microsoft has already confirmed that News and Interests is optional, so if this is something that you don’t find useful, you can disable it.
Besides, this is an early version of the feature, and flashy as it might be for some, Microsoft is sure to refine it before its official release so that it eats less memory.
