An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Plenty of apps that you install on your computer have a setting that tells them to launch when you initially log in to save you the trouble of launching your most commonly used apps yourself. Leaving this setting on can also allow apps to check for updates or launch more quickly when you start them for the first time. The difference for some of the preinstalled Microsoft apps in Windows 10 and 11 is that they use some of these resources by default, whether you actually use the apps or not. Developer and IT admin Michael Niehaus drew attention to some of these apps in recent blog posts examining the resource usage of Windows 11's widgets, Microsoft Teams, and Microsoft Edge in a fresh install of Windows 11 (the Edge observations apply to Windows 10, too). Both Widgets and Teams spawn a number of Microsoft Edge WebView2 processes in order to work—WebView2 is a way to use Edge and its rendering engine without launching Edge or using its user interface. Collectively, these processes use a few hundred megabytes of memory to work. The widget-related processes don't start unless you actually click the widgets button, though they remain in the background afterward, even if you're not actively viewing your widgets. But the Teams processes all launch automatically, whether you actually use Teams or not. Uninstalling Teams will prevent this from happening, but Niehaus points out that simply removing the Teams icon from Windows 11's Taskbar in the Taskbar settings is enough to keep these WebView2 processes from launching when you log in. Ars Technica's Andrew Cunningham also recommends disabling System Boost in the Edge settings if you don't use it as your default browser. Otherwise, it too will use a couple hundred megabytes of memory.

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According to a post on the Microsoft IT Pro Blog, Windows computers will need at least eight hours of online time to obtain and install the latest OS updates successfully. Tom's Hardware reports: Another revelation in the post is that Microsoft tracks how long PCs are connected to Windows Update, calling the statistics "Update Connectivity." The data is available to IT managers in the InTune app, a component of the Endpoint management suite. The post details Microsoft's attempts to figure out why some Windows devices aren't getting the latest quality and feature updates, and discovered that two hours of continuous connectivity was required to get updates. It then took six hours after the release of the patch for a machine to update itself reliably. Microsoft's figures show that 50 percent of Windows devices left behind by Windows Update and running a build of Windows 10 that's no longer serviced do not spend enough time connected to have the patches downloaded and installed in the background. This figure drops to 25 percent for customers using a serviced build of the operating system that lags behind in security updates by 60 days or more. The goods news, as noted by Tom's Hardware, is that "Windows 11 updates are smaller than their Windows 10 counterparts due to improved compression [and] new Microsoft Graph APIs," which should help speed up the update process.

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