She also switched her power plan to "Best performance" (counter-intuitively, power-saver modes often compress RAM, causing stutter) and went into Advanced System Settings > Performance > Visual Effects. She un-checked "Transparency effects," "Animations," and "Taskbar animations." Windows became uglier but breathable .
Then came the real battle: services.
The biggest monster was hidden: Microsoft Teams' chat integration. It lived inside File Explorer, sipping 400 MB just to show a contact icon. A quick registry tweak ( HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\Advanced ) and a new DWORD called TaskbarMn set to 0 killed it. reduce ram usage windows 11
She opened Task Manager.
She typed services.msc into the Run dialog. A long list of Windows processes appeared. "SysMain," formerly known as SuperFetch, was pre-loading apps she never used. She stopped it. "Windows Search" was indexing every file on her SSD—a feature designed for 2005 hard drives, not modern NVMe. She disabled that too. She also switched her power plan to "Best