Over the past week, I’ve switched two older PCs from Insider Preview to Production builds. For the record, the X380 is a 2018 vintage Lenovo ThinkPad X380 Yoga, while the X12 is a 2021 vintage Lenovo ThinkPad X12 Convertible Tablet Gen 1. Happily, this production switchover produces unexpected speed-up for both machines across the board. Let me tell you more…
Why Production Switchover Produces Unexpected Speed-up
MS has been on a bit of a tear lately, trying to repair its user credibility and brand image for Windows 11. Industry observers have noticed and published stories like these:
- Neowin (Mar 20) Microsoft shares details on Windows 11 … performance improvements
- WindowsLatest (Oct 5) Windows 11 26H2 quietly shipped with a major performance boost…
My usual response to such coverage is “Yeah, right, sure…” (delivered with an eye roll and a skeptical tone of voice). But this time, it’s possible that the coverage is both apt and accurate.
What Improvements Might One Find in 26H2?
After the switchover from Beta (X380) and Insider Preview (X12) builds on those PCs to mainline 26H2 (Build 26300.9711 as I write this). I’ve noticed snappier response and quicker completions across the board on both machines. Some of this, says Copilot (and I agree) is simply a natural outcome of switching from a more heavily instrumented and closely monitored Insider release to a more streamlined and less tarted-up production release.
But there’s more. I am seeing noticeably faster performance on both PCs including:
- Improved system responsiveness
- Faster app launch times
- Faster File Explorer
- Lower RAM usage
- Reduced latency in UI interactions
Case in point: I just ran winget upgrade -all --include-unknown on both PCs and they ran updates on CrystalDiskInfo, WinScript, CoreTemp and (as shown) MS.Gameinput. All did their work — checking the manifest, showing the update list, then performing the individual updates — enough faster than their previous usual that I noticed an improvement.
Same thing goes for app launches, installs and uninstalls outside of WinTerm. As old as these two machines are, I feel like they’ve gained a new lease on life. Here in Windows-World, that’s a win! Maybe I didn’t shoot myself quite as badly in the foot with the “Let’s try Installation Assistant and see what happens” experiment on these PCs as I had originally feared. Woo-hoo!
