A new Copilot feature tells you what might be slowing down your PC—while gorging itself on a fair chunk of your system RAM
Overview & Key Takeaways
It can't help, can it?
If you ask Microsoft Copilot if it's a web app, it answers in the negative. Technically, as the AI points out, Copilot now interfaces with you through an Edge-based web app installed on your Windows 11 PC, but the model lives elsewhere in the cloud.
And said Copilot app is getting a helpful new feature, according to Windows Latest, referred to as PC Insights. This will allow it to connect to Windows APIs and analyse your system hardware, answering questions like "what is my current CPU usage" and helping you find what might be slowing down your PC.
Other example prompts found by Windows Latest include "Do I have enough space for a 100 GB game," "What graphics card do I have," and "Is my antivirus running?"
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The feature is said to be currently rolling out to Copilot US users, and sounds rather useful, even if it can't directly fix PC performance problems by itself. Unfortunately, the web app can be something of a RAM hog, which raises the possibility that Copilot itself may be contributing to your dog-slow PC performance on a RAM-limited machine.
Windows Latest recorded 791.7 MB of RAM usage from the Copilot app at idle, suggesting it can reach up to 1 GB of system RAM usage in total. I've left the Copilot app open in the background as I write this article, and it's currently sitting at around 560 MB—making it the third most RAM-heavy application currently running on my PC.
(Image credit: Microsoft)
That might not sound like a big deal, but anyone using Copilot to help find resource-sapping applications running in the background may find it's the app itself that's taking the biggest chunk of precious RAM space. And it's not like we're living in a world where extra system RAM is cheap and easy to obtain.
It's not the only RAM-sapping offender I have to bat away on a regular basis, either. The WhatsApp, err... app is also a web-based affair these days, and regularly carves out 1 GB+ chunks of my system resources. Which seems a bit rich, given the previous, non-web app implementation barely used any RAM capacity at all.
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Although Microsoft has committed to making Windows 11 leaner and meaner in response to user critique in recent months, it still feels like a bloated OS in comparison to... well, almost any other operating system you can think of.
And while I welcome the idea that Copilot will soon be able to help less-computer-minded users track down potential system problems, it seems like one of the most useful things it could do to improve performance would be to shut itself down entirely. Which is... not the greatest state of affairs, let's be honest.
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